


Bring the sun back

by pushdragon



Category: Merlin (BBC)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-27
Updated: 2011-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-16 00:00:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inexplicable things keep happening around Arthur. In the end, he can only accept that he's cursed with magic. Magic needs to be stamped out, and Arthur shows himself no mercy. - NOW with a epilogue (chapter 5) in which Arthur and Merlin return to Camelot to work out where they stand wth magic and each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It happened on the way back from an utterly ordinary patrol. An uncommonly gentle day where the decayed leaves of a long-ago autumn hushed the horses' footfall, and the weak sunlight itself seemed benign. The sort of day where a prince could believe the kingdom had finally turned a corner and left the constant peril of the last few years behind.

And then he saw the smoke.

The mill that lay on the riverbank, outside the castle walls, was burning. The fire had taken a firm hold already – as he spurred his mount toward it, tongues of flame licked out of the highest windows, growing bigger and bolder each moment. As he drew closer, the gritty taste of ash struck the back of his throat, and then he was into the heart of it, riding into the grey shadow under the smoke clouds, his men following somewhere behind him.

Deep in the haze, the palace guards struggled alongside townsmen, beating at the flames with wet sacks, hands and faces a painful depth of red where the skin showed through the soot. The fire made eerie howling sounds through the small upper windows and the rents in the collapsing ceiling. A sack of grain in the loft exploded, throwing tiles off the roof and spraying embers like a rainstorm down below. Kendall the miller shouted in pain and clapped his hand over the place where one had struck his eye.

"Get back." Raising his voice over the groan of timber and the roar of the fire, Arthur swung down out of the saddle. From a distance, the building had appeared lost. They could save some of the furniture on the lower floor, if they were lucky. Everything else would be incinerated, and he did not intend to see any lives wasted in vain heroism.

But the miller had ignored his command, advancing back into the shimmering heat with his injured eye closed and his ragged sack raised to do battle with the blaze.

"Hold there!" Arthur repeated his order as he glanced around for something he could take in hand to help, something less useless than the sword at his hip.

A cry came from the top of the building, shrill but faint, a woman or a child. Arthur had to drag the miller back as a beam gave way, showering scorching hot shingles on the rescuers.

"I said get back, man. I'll take care of it."

But the very frame of the doorway was crawling with fingers of flame, extensions of the great blazing hand pushing outwards from the other side. The man's half-crazy look said that Arthur could do nothing more than he could have: fight the blaze until it took his life and then burned the building to the ground nonetheless.

Over the miller's shoulder, he saw a figure dart into motion. He knew the narrow shoulders, the flash of blue neck-cloth, instantly. Merlin rounded the corner of the building and leapt down the bank into the shallows, towards the great wheel of the mill which stood at a halt in the water, two storeys high, its rotation apparently jammed by a fallen beam above. Merlin forced his way through the current which churned white around it, while smoke billowed between its upper spokes, lashed through with fire. The cry from above came again, and the miller struggled to get free while the men all around him beat desperately at the flames. Releasing him, Arthur stepped back to reassess the burning building, searching for any way to reach whoever was trapped inside it. But the door was ablaze, the windows too small and high, the only way up would to climb the-

As his attention swung back to the mill-wheel, it had already come free from its axle and begun to fall, silent and stealthy. Cloaked in flame and smoke, its top rim tilted out over the water and picked up deadly momentum. Fear pierced him as he glanced down and saw what he most dreaded: Merlin was under its path, dwarfed by its flaming bulk. It was almost upon him when he looked up and saw it.

Arthur's eye was trained to sift possible from impossible in a fraction of a glance and to act swiftly on what it saw. Even without the impediment of thigh-deep water, Arthur's eye told him without intervention from his heart that Merlin could not be saved. He threw up his arm at the last moment in a pathetic shield against the mass of the blazing wheel.

Arthur's hand shot out, as if by will alone he could harness time and nature and undo what had been set in train. Not like this, not now, not so pointlessly. Since he could do no more, he fixed his gaze on the blue of Merlin's neck-cloth and thought _Stop!_

And the wheel stopped. He saw it freeze, with its upper rim ablaze just a few handspans short of the crouched form that looked so tiny beneath it. Then Merlin crawled out from under it, and hurried around the corner of the mill, out of Arthur’s sight. The wheel hit the water in a great hiss of waves and steam and everything was lost in mist.

"You idiot," Arthur snapped at him later, once the conflagration had abruptly died down for what must have been lack of fuel, after the miller's wife had been put in Gaius's care and Arthur had personally made sure no-one else was left in the steaming wreck of the building. "What on earth did you think you were doing?"

Merlin looked up from where he had been bathing the scorched feet of the miller's elderly father in cool river water. Filthy and wet – and, judging by the look on his face, as breezily disrespectful as ever – he was the last person in the world to deserve any sort of miracle. When he opened his mouth to reply, all that came out was a fit of coughing that left his eyes streaming and his sleeve speckled with dark grey splotches.

"Let Gaius deal with this," Arthur told him. "Get back to the castle. I want an inventory of everything that will be needed for rebuilding. Wait for me in my quarters. Stoke up the fire and tend to it until I get back – and don't, for mercy's sake, go off on some fool's errand that makes you ill."

Merlin's mouth opened to gasp the word "But-"

"Would it kill you, for once in your life, to do what I ask you?"

Arthur turned his back, because he could feel how shock was loosening his control over his temper, and none of these people should see him at anything but his best. He instructed one of the knights to stand over Merlin until he was shut up in Arthur's quarters, and then he set about performing the useless little gestures that made up the business of being a prince, allowing his subjects to go on believing it was in his power to make everything all right.

**

This was not the only hair's-breadth escape that defied explanation. Of course, there had been others. Arrows that bent mid-flight. Saddle falls miraculously cushioned by a pile of windswept leaves. And how many times had he plunged into a group of assailants only to find, once the fighting was done, more casualties than he remembered felling?

Arthur knew how to stare Fate in the eye and write his own destiny. When the odds were against him, he pictured the moment of victory as a certainty in his mind, and worked his body to the brink until he made it real. A man fighting with his every breath drew good fortune his way, no-one knew that better than Arthur. Whatever powers there were rewarded courage.

But this. What had happened today was not the doing of any will but Arthur's. Merlin was a servant, and an erratic one, low-born, inconsequential to the greater world, hardly likely to be graced by divine protection. The only hand that would brave fire or blade in his defence was Arthur's. And it had. He had been shocked by the intensity of fear freezing through him as he had watched the wheel's deadly fall. Motivation was everything. He already knew that he could wring greater endurance from his limbs when Camelot was under threat than he ever could for mere glory on the tournament field. Apparently the thought of losing a member of his own household could rouse him to something more extraordinary still.

Something with the power to destroy. The evil that had almost brought down his father's kingdom was in him. Perhaps the worst stories about the manner of his birth were true, after all. Magic had got into his bones. And, unlike the might of his sword arm, it was not subject to his control.

Once he'd sent Merlin away with a piece of honeycomb and warm milk for his throat and finished off the inventory, he sat on the edge of his bed and tried to wield the unearthly power again. He put a feather from his pillow on the table and tried to move it with his thoughts; it produced not even a flutter. He dropped it from a height, but nothing he could do made it hesitate in its fall. He tried it on a comb in case there was some special property in wood, still to no avail.

Whatever it was, this power, it came to him in times of peril and left him afterwards. He did not like to be at its mercy, and could not allow himself to be. Not when he held Camelot's fate in his hands.

Some time long after the household had fallen quiet, when his temples started to ache from the concentration, he threw his clothes on the floor and crawled into bed to try to imagine how he ought to act if this affliction had beset one of his knights instead of himself, and whether he could allow himself any grounds for mercy.

**

"Gaius." Arthur leaned across the workbench to turn a flask around as if he were curious about its contents, so that he could talk confidentially. "I ought to look into this. There might be sorcerers living here in Camelot. In secrecy, I mean. As long as they don't use their magic openly, there would be no way to find them out."

"I'm sure you don't need to worry about sorcerers in disguise," Gaius told him, grinding attentively with his pestle. "Magic is a necessity for some, and simply too great a temptation for others. It cannot lie hidden for long."

There was a creak as Merlin shifted in his seat at the table. Arthur leaned in closer.

"Impossible, then? Hasn't anyone ever turned away from magic? If they just had the strength not to use it, it might disappear altogether. Like – like the strength of a soldier's sword arm if it doesn't get regular use."

Gaius mouth moved thoughtfully but he did not look up. "I've never heard of it happening like that."

"It must be possible. If they learned to get by without magic, they could live in safety. My father has demonstrated the consequences of using magic over and over again. Surely one or two more sensible sorcerers must have the willpower to abstain." He quietened his rising voice. "Or does magic force them to do evil whether they like it or not?"

From the corner table came the thud of Merlin abruptly shutting the book he had been reading.

"Nothing is simple when it comes to magic," Gaius began.

But the conversation had already gone further than Arthur had meant it to.

He said, "It makes no difference. They will all be dealt with. Camelot deserves to be safe."

He had his answer; it was there in the things that Gaius wouldn't say. Magic could not lie inert. It could not be hidden. It was as Arthur had thought – it demanded to be used, regardless of the intentions of the one who wielded it. It was not like a sword that could be hidden away in times of peace. It was a weapon permanently drawn, all too easy to use in anger, or panic, or by accident. Magic itself was dangerous, not just the magician.

"Merlin, take the day off. There's nothing I need. Stay out of trouble."

**

As it turned out, he had no opportunity that day to do what needed to be done, even with Merlin out of the way. It was almost two weeks later that the chance arose. It came out of the blue. Even though he'd had time to set his affairs quietly in order and reconcile himself to the inevitable regrets, it was harder than he had expected to set his foot on the first step of his path. But he would do it; by the time the chance came again, it might be too late.

The boy stammering at the king in the audience chamber was exhausted with the unfamiliar ride made in desperate haste. He stared at the floor in front of Uther's feet and clenched his raw hands behind his back as he described a great beast with lion claws and eagle wings, black fur and a gaping jaw with teeth in rows like saw blades.

"- and we never found a trace of them. Not any of them, sire. Not even so much as a shoe."

"You've done well," Arthur told him before the hint of tears in the boy's voice could become a reality. "Our men will take care of it now. Go down to the kitchens and get something to eat. We leave immediately afterwards."

He picked three soldiers for strength and perseverance and sent them ahead of him to see the horses ready while he detoured first to the kitchen then, hurriedly, to his rooms.

He met Merlin waiting outside the stable door.

"No." He refused even to slow his stride. "I want all my knives sharpened and my buckles polished. There's no way you can spare the time for some fantasy of adventure, and there is nothing you can do that four trained fighting men can't manage."

"You might need a decoy." Merlin shrugged, falling into their old half-hearted joking. "Bait. You have to admit, you get into all sorts of trouble when I'm not around."

Arthur swung up into the saddle, snatched the reins from the groom and kicked his horse toward the gates, and did not respond to the grin he heard behind the words.

"Make yourself useful. Remind Leon to get the broken window in the scullery fixed before someone catches their death from the cold. And find out when those spokes for the mill will be finished – I want them taken down by the time– No. Tell them the day after tomorrow."

Merlin's teasing voice followed him. "Don't come crying to me if you get bitten in half by a monster."

He didn't look back to where Merlin was almost certainly giving him his usual look of amusement mixed with incipient mutiny. He didn't look back from the gate, either, and he certainly didn't glance over his shoulder at Camelot's pale silhouette as he cleared the ridge above the river and dropped out of sight of it for good. Sentiment and duty made poor bedfellows.

"You three go along the road," Arthur barked as they approached the village, wheeling his horse away. "I'll cut through the forest and see if I can take it by surprise."

"My lord, shouldn't one of us come with you? The creature is too much for one man."

Arthur had not chosen these men for their initiative.

"If I go alone, I can get close enough to have a look at it. Two of us won't stand a chance." He was peeling away from them, past the verges of the road where the shadow of oak forest began. "If I don't reach you in time, aim for the eyes and see if you can scare it off with fire."

He jerked the reins to the right and left them behind, streaking through the forest until he reached the first signs of the beast's presence: a splintered tree and, a dozen paces further on, the savaged carcass of a deer. He dismounted swiftly and cut his saddle pack free with a blunt old knife that left a rent that might resemble a claw. He severed one of the stirrups too for good measure. It took longer than he had hoped to shoot a slow hare but the blood was a necessary effect, though his poor horse shied away as Arthur dripped it on. Then there was nothing more to do than untie the reins and send the horse on his way. He was a stubborn old thing, taught steadiness in the brutal school of battle. At first he would not leave, and turned back to nose Arthur's shoulder questioningly.

"Go!" Arthur shouted, with a fierce slap that finally got rid of him.

The going was hard on foot. But once he had found a half-crumbled well to throw his armour, bow and sword into, he moved quickly through the fading light. Under his cloak and hood, with his knives concealed, he could not have resembled a prince, or even a knight, but he kept off the roads in any case, so that no witnesses should have cause to talk of a strange man they had passed.

From a far hilltop, much later, he could just make out the glow of torches moving among the trees where he had been. The voices that must have called for him did not carry across the distance. There would be hardship in the short term, as his father grimly held out hope that the searchers would find a wounded man and not a body. When they found neither, there was only one conclusion they could come to.

Camelot would grieve, he knew this without indulging in vanity. Yet it was better, far better, that they should think him dead than know him for what he was.

**

"Merlin?"

It was Gaius again. The last few times it had been Gwen, and he had almost succumbed to her pleas.

"It's been four days." Now he spoke gently, not like the last time when he had grown as angry as Merlin had even known him, his words blunt and vicious. "People are more frightened than ever. The king's men are hunting witches. Of course they blame magic. And they are not far from the truth, are they?"

It must have been sometime after noon, though it was hard to tell. What the windows let in could barely be described as twilight. Merlin could only just distinguish the lighter grey of the wall from the deeper shadow that filled the empty fireplace or hung beneath the canopy of Arthur's bed. The stones against his back had no warmth in them. The daily rhythms of the castle were all broken by the unnatural darkness that had descended upon it. He heard the fear and distress in the voices that came up from the courtyard.

For four mornings now, the sun had not risen. At least, not over Camelot.

"Merlin. This is not the way to mourn him. Please open the door."

He had not cast any specific spell to bring down the artificial night. He had not even noticed it until the second day, or the third, when Gaius had finally connected Merlin's absence with the barricaded door of Arthur's room and come to offer what he thought was comfort.

"I've brought you a bowl of stew. You must have something to eat."

In the basin on the stand Merlin had found a little water left over from when Arthur must have washed his face before he left on the last errand he would ever ride. Merlin had drunk it some time ago, sip by sip. It might have been yesterday. Since then, he had welcomed the creep of dehydration, lips cracked and the flesh of his throat sticking together whenever he thought to swallow. It was a fitting manifestation of the deadness in his chest.

He couldn't feel the absence of food at all. It was trivial compared to the greater absence from which his mind couldn't find a moment's rest. He had failed Arthur, failed in his destiny.

"Leave me alone, Gaius. I don't want to hear anything you've got to say."

He hated the defeated sigh that came faintly through the door. "I had to do it. I'm sorry. When your head isn't clouded with grief, I hope you will understand."

"I'm not listening."

For emphasis, he made the empty ewer rise up into the air and hurl itself against the inside of the door. A stray shard from its wreckage left a stinging gash on his shin. He slumped his chin onto his knees and let it bleed.

Beside him was Arthur's bed, a far more comfortable alternative to the stone floor that had long ago driven his legs numb. With every moment, the last time Arthur had slept in it receded further into history. In the mornings when Merlin straightened the covers, he had used to find them still warm, full of the effortless body heat that had seemed a natural product of Arthur's strength of presence. They would be cold now, cold forever.

**

"What's a stonemason doing in these parts then?"

The farmer remained half-hidden behind the open door, and a scurrying inside suggested that his wife or a child was bringing a weapon to hand in case whatever they feared about Arthur proved to be true.

"Travelling," he replied, with a smile that had been fairly good at putting people at ease when he had been a prince. He thought the choice of trade might explain the breadth of his shoulders, and the calluses on his palms could just as well have come from a hammer and chisel as a sword. "My mother has taken ill. I'm wasting no time to reach her. I'll be gone at first light."

"You can pay your way, can you?" the man asked; it sounded like a convenient excuse to deny him.

Arthur rifled through his pocket for one of the small coins he had gathered over the last few days in preparation. The man glared at it, but eventually held out his palm.

"You can have the barn." He indicated a damp looking structure behind the house. "The wife will put out a cold meal for you. You'll be too early for bread in the morning."

"Thank you."

He managed, mostly, to keep the haughty note out of it.

He laid out his scrap of blanket by the woodpile, padded it underneath with what trampled straw he could find. The barn was empty, though it smelled as if it must once have held some sort of animal. Not even the scuttling of mice broke the silence. In a little while, he would lie down and sleep, without any last-minute hitches to resolve, without anyone to put out the half-spent candle in the bowl by the door.

Solitude was a foreign country. Since childhood, his father had surrounded him with a protective cordon of companions and knights, to say nothing of the anonymous mechanics of the servants. Within and among them all, he had made his own way, but to be self-reliant, he was learning, was a far cry from being alone.

He got the rolled pages out of his pack and opened them in the dark, as if the echo of words in ink might pass for some sort of company.

**

Morning showed things in a more optimistic light. The night's rainstorm had been a blessing of a sort. Huddled under his cloak to escape the cold drips leaking through the roof had anchored his dreams firmly to reality. He woke this time not to the illusion that he was back in his bed with a bowl of steaming water and a freshly stoked fire awaiting him, but to the quiet certainty of the path that lay ahead. It bolstered him to start the day unburdened by the reluctant longing for what he'd left behind.

A brief search in the grey light produced an axe, and he had soon chopped a neat lot of firewood from the logs in the barn. He wondered what the family took for breakfast, and whether it would be proper to offer something from his pack. The ordered pile grew and the rhythm of metal and wood sounded pleasing. Each stroke made his aim more confident, made his shoulders looser and brought the warmth of exertion into his arms.

"I make it well past first light."

The open hostility warned Arthur to turn very carefully, lowering the axe as he did so. Keeping to the security of a couple of paces from his house, the farmer was aiming a crossbow that looked like it had last seen service a decade or more ago. His hand was steady on the weapon. Now that he had raised it, perhaps his life and his family's depended on getting off a good shot.

In the man's clenched grip, Arthur understood what he looked like without the emblems of royalty all over him. He looked like a stranger with a practised sword arm, a wealth of secrets, an unbending will, and a deadly weapon in his hands.

"I'll be on my way then," he said.

He leaned the axe against the stump and backed away from it. For a hot-headed moment, he considered rushing the man, to see if this accursed magic would come to his aid and deflect the bolt from him. But he could not afford the rumour that would generate.

The woods were eerily quiet as he continued through them. There was frost underfoot in the clearings. A rustle in a patch of bramble made him reach for his knife. By the time his eyes told him it was only a startled fox, his body had already set itself unconsciously in defence. It took him a moment to realise what he had done. He was angled to shield the man who was always a step behind him. He had almost called out the name in warning: his lips had joined in the first letter of it.

He wondered bitterly how long it would take before he cut Merlin's ghostly shadow loose from him. As he sheathed the blade, Arthur allowed himself to look over his shoulder, just once, in case he might not really be as alone as he thought.

**

More prisoners had come in during the night. Merlin had heard every cry and plea they had made – not a true sorcerer among them, he was certain – as the soldiers added them to the crowds in the dungeons. The stench of burning flesh would be next.

The pulse in Merlin's temple beat against the stone floor. Now that Arthur was gone, that was how it was going to be. Uther's iron justice would no longer be tempered by his son's finer heart. Camelot would burn until his grief was sated, and long after that. In time, Uther would choose one of the knights as his successor, maybe marry him to Morgana for some loose familial connection. Or he would search out a neighbouring princess to try for a new heir he could train in his own unbending image.

And every day from now until the end would be a day without Arthur in it.

If it had grown light enough today for the window mullions to cast a very faint shadow in the grey of the opposite wall, it was not because Merlin's despair had lifted. If anything, it grew worse as the torpor of grief lessened and allowed his mind to catalogue all the many ways in which the kingdom, without Arthur, would not be worth living in. But as his body grew weaker, so did his magic. Soon his pain would be just the pain of an ordinary man, and the first sun would rise on a future he wanted no part of.

He had another two days left to him, he thought, before he would be too weak to open the door at all.

"Merlin?" Gaius's voice. Gwen had come again in the meantime, but even her quiet tears had failed to rouse him. "I need your help."

Merlin said nothing.

"It concerns one of my books."

It was brave of him to come here talking of books. The flame of anger kindled again in Merlin's belly. Hadn't Gaius killed his last, slender hope by tearing all the pages on necromancy from his library and throwing them on the fire? Irrelevant, in hindsight, since if they found the body now it would be too late even for magic to save him. But that hope had been all that Merlin could cling to in his darkest hour and Gaius, Gaius had burned it to nothing.

"The yellow book on historical accounts of sorcery. Have you got it with you?"

Books. Useless words. Merlin shut his eyes and put his hands over his face.

"Merlin?" There was fear in his voice this time.

"Leave me alone, Gaius."

"Oh good. I thought it wasn't likely to be you. Whoever took it has left a gold coin in its place. A curious thing. Now, Merlin, I've brought you something from the kitchens."

He slid it through the narrow crack beneath the door. The smell hit Merlin instantly. Hot beef, sliced very fine, resting on a sheet of parchment.

"Gwen will be back at supper with more."

The mere smell of food must have fuelled his mind. His thoughts leapt one over the other once Gaius's footsteps had receded. The book, full of more fairy tales than solid spellwork, wasn't important. It couldn't bring Arthur back. But the mention of it plagued him to distraction. He brushed it from his mind time and time again until, finally, he saw it from the right angle to understand what it meant. Hope flooded him, starting behind his ribs and flowing out like the warmth of strong liquor.

Scrambling to his feet, he thrust open Arthur's chest and went through it. The wardrobe was next. The book was not there. Few enough people had access to Gaius's books, none of them thieves by nature. Of those, who would be bold enough to take a volume, yet honourable enough to leave a disproportionately large payment? On his knees, he checked the mattress and felt behind the bedhead. Breath held, he took Arthur's shirts out one by one from their shelf. On that fateful morning, he had put out a red one. It was not just frantic denial that made him count them now. Another one was missing: brown, he thought, or black. Still there was no sign of the book, and a man on a mission to kill a wild creature had no reason to go equipped for leisurely reading. Of the few people at liberty to enter Gaius's rooms who might pay handsomely for a pilfered book, whose purse held gold straight from the royal treasury rather than common copper or silver?

Gaius had barely registered the crash of the opening door when Merlin had thrown his arms around him.

"Gaius, thank you, thank you. You're a miracle worker. I'll never forget you as long as I live."

Merlin couldn't release him. His knees didn't feel strong enough. He let Gaius take hold of him, one hand gentle on the back of his neck.

Wherever Arthur was and whatever his reasons, he had taken a book, and some clothes, and other things that Merlin would not sleep or sit down until he had discovered.

He couldn't see what the weather outside was doing now. He didn't need to. It felt like sunlight all around him.

**


	2. Chapter 2

When the rain started to come down like an upturned pitcher, Arthur wedged himself under the shelter of an overhanging rock. Climbing any further in this weather was suicidal.

He had always been idly proud of his ability to bear hardship. In what battles he had faced, he ate what his knights ate, down to the lowest of them, and slept on the very same stony ground. He felt cheated to learn how much harder it was to bear it all alone.

Since yesterday morning, he had passed no-one to speak to. He almost had to touch his lips to make sure they were still capable of forming words. His thoughts were starting to feel caged inside his head. This had to stop. Things died in cages, or lost their spirit.

From his pocket he took an onion and peeled off the papery outer layer and the dirt with it. His bite reduced it by a quarter. He chewed slowly and bit again. It was young and sweet and completely not enough. It was going to rattle like a pebble in the empty bowl of his stomach.

"Those blisters must go right to the bone," he observed to himself in a hoarse, unfamiliar voice, inspecting the side of his wet and muddy boots.

He had pulled up two small onions from a meagre garden some distance back. If the woman and her children hadn't appeared to be alone in the house, he would have knocked on the door and paid openly. Instead, he left his smallest coin on the back step and wondered if it was too little or too much.

He returned the uneaten half of the onion to his pocket. "Go back and fetch me another. Bring my horse. And for mercy's sake, try not to fasten the saddle straps as if you were tying the poor beast down for torture."

Only silence answered him, more silence than he'd ever imagined.

Once he got through the hills, he would not have far to go. The book spoke of an island in a dark lake, hidden by reeds. The witch on the island had once given magic to a knight who wanted it badly enough to be her lover. If she had the power to bestow it, she must also know how to take it away. She would consent to do it for him, or he would find a way to make her do it. Unless he succeeded, he would have to seek a humble life and a lonely death, as far away as he could get from Camelot.

"Come on," he said, resuming his climb as the rain languished into a drizzle. "Don't fall behind. And if I hear another word of complaint, it'll be the stocks for you." This time he refused to let the silence master him. "Yes, in the rain. And I'd say these onions will leave a lasting bruise as well."

**

Merlin jerked up with a start when his nose touched the water.

Its surface, under the gentle ripples radiating out from where he'd touched it, showed the usual unintelligible collage, blurred images trapped in the ghostly world beneath. There at the top, Arthur's face, asleep, in what could have been today, or a week ago, or much longer. It revealed nothing. Taking shape beside it was Arthur grim and steady with his sword drawn, but that was in Ealdor, in the past. Landscapes appeared and vanished too: a rocky hillside that could be anywhere, a tournament field, an empty beach where they had had what Merlin had feared might be their last argument. There, Arthur took a bite of a meagre looking apple. And there was Arthur with ash in his hair, from the day of the mill fire, turning Merlin's jaw with his fingers to make sure that the wounds under the soot were not dangerous. Images, places, memories mixed with imagination.

He ignored the knock at the door. It had been like this for the whole two days. He could stare at the surface of the water until it steamed; he could add a kite's feather, or a ring of ivy, or a hair from Arthur's pillow, but it made no difference. He saw Arthur everywhere, but could not make his eye focus on where he was now.

As the door opened, he dropped a small knife into the bowl of water and made to wash it. The images scattered to nothing.

"Gaius sent for you," said the guard, looking uncomfortable. "He asked for more of the truth draught."

"I'll see to it," Merlin told him.

The draught which Merlin decanted from the cauldron into a flask had nothing to do with truth. The only ingredients with any power were a sedative which produced a blank expression redolent of honesty, and a gentle narcotic to ease the pain. It was the best help they could give the prisoners as the king turned his formidable will to the task of discovering who had brought the beast that had robbed him of his son and then disappeared at the first sign of resistance. Uther was beyond reason. Even Leon had stopped trying to bring him round to mercy.

Gaius had advised against informing Uther that his son might still be living. At the moment, he was going slowly through the supposed sorcerers his men had harvested for him, as if he had chosen this as a purpose to keep him from the mire of grief. If he believed that Arthur was alive, he would not wait calmly for his return. He would rip up the kingdom until Arthur was found, and on the prisoners he would use such cruelties as got him quick answers.

In any case, nothing was certain. Yesterday, Merlin had found the yellow book, hidden in the disused chimney of the armoury. For a moment, all hope had deserted him and he had felt the despair of those five days of darkness clutching once again at his heart. But as his fingers fumbled open the cover, he saw the place where three pages had been excised, neatly, with a steady hand, a fine blade, and an instinct for precision. He touched the stubs of the pages with a sentiment that would never have occurred to him in the days when Arthur was here, always dissatisfied, always abrasive, distant, dismissive, but everywhere.

He had trimmed a strip from the book, too, and put that in the scrying bowl, but that had not helped his dazed eye to focus. All it showed him this time was a muddy shore obscured by reeds and mist. It could have been anywhere.

**

The lake looked placid and not very deep. Possibly Arthur could have waded across without putting his head underwater. But the mist might have been playing with his judgment. Already his senses were needling him to prepare for danger, as if they detected some menace that was hidden from his eyes. He did not need to check the description from the book. There was no doubting that this was the place.

Under the boughs of an old willow, he found a coracle with one oar, hardly more than a water-borne basket, about the right size for a child to play in.

"Go on then," he said. "You first. You look enough like a drowned rat already – a bit of lake water can only be an improvement."

Then he untied it anyway. It sank down deep when he got in, but it clung to the water's surface with unlikely tenacity. He pushed off quickly, before any misgivings could occur to him.

He was only a little way from the shore when the lake's placidity turned into something else entirely. Stroke by stroke, the going got harder, and the easy flex of his shoulders became a struggle. It was as if he were in a river, forcing his way against the current, and fighting an uphill slope as well. Fight it he did, kneeling forward on the straw and pitch lining, driving stroke after stroke into the hostile tide. If he called his magic to his aid, he could not feel the difference. It was his body that prevailed. Working like they did in the heat of battle, his arms and back and shoulders wrung themselves out to do what had to be done, dragging the far shore closer and closer towards him. The rhythm of his strokes got faster as the sweat soaked into his shift, until his heart and lungs strained fit to burst. Then all of a sudden he broke through the last of the water's resistance, and the coracle swept in through the screen of reeds to lodge in the grey silt of the shore.

Landing on hands and knees on solid ground, he rested until he had recovered enough to face what lay ahead at his strongest. He had three knives, and unnatural powers which he had not come close to mastering. For the rest, he would have to trust in himself.

On the shore he had left, the marks of emerging spring had been apparent in the green miasma about the branches, but here there was no sign of the loosening of winter's grip. The trees by the water were squat and bare as gallows. The coarse bushes that extended into the mist as far as he could see had brittle leaves the same colour as the dirt in which they grew. The path that disappeared between them ran over worn rock.

In a clearing where nothing grew but grey and white toadstools, he found a woman of his father's age, perhaps older. She looked up from the rope she was threading as if she were not at all surprised to see him.

"I have come for your help, my lady."

He was used to people scattering out of his way, or mumbling the words that were due to his rank. Her detached way of looking at him was new, and he badly wanted to announce his identity, to see if it put some hint of respect in her. But instead, he added, "I have an affliction."

She put aside her rope, at least. Her fingers were bony, neat and strong, more like a courtly matron's than the magic-gnarled deformity he had been expecting. It was hard to say whether he could trust her. Meeting her eyes was like coming into the presence of a hunting bird. He felt no sense of threat, but no kindred recognition either. It was as if they met as two different creatures entirely, with a distance between them that language was not enough to cross.

Then she smiled. A kind light came into her pale irises, so that the white streaks in her hair seemed grandmotherly and benign and he knew he could appeal to her.

"What is it, my son? You have shown great endurance to come here. I will help you if I can."

"Magic," Arthur said, the first time he had put it in words. "I have magic in me. I want you to cure it."

It took a moment for her to show her surprise.

"Many would consider that a blessing. They would seek ways to use it. They would make themselves kings. There are men who have begged me to favour them with the powers you wish to have taken out like a rotten tooth."

She rose from the log she had been sitting on. She was taller than he had thought, with a graceful shape he had not expected under her hooded cloak.

"Perhaps you are a leader of men already. You imagine you do not need it."

She could not know who he was. He had been meticulous about casting off every marker that might signify Camelot. Even the red shirt, with tiny embroidered dragons on the cuffs, had been left in a cluster of brambles. And he was three days' journey from the most distant reaches of his father's realm.

"All I need is the strength that comes from hard work."

The certainty returned that she could see more than he meant her to.

"How long has magic answered your call?"

"Since the summer before last. A little longer, maybe."

"Never in childhood?"

"No. Never."

She grasped his wrist and laid her palm over his own. For a long time, she did not move, deep in concentration. From not far away, a bird cried out harshly, and he wondered what sort of creature could live in this desolate place.

"Oh yes," she said finally. "I can feel it in you. Powerful magic. Wild magic. It must have taken great strength of character to control it for so long."

Arthur had to swallow hard, thinking of what he could have done at his angriest, when Camelot or anyone he cared for was under threat.

"Can you cure me?"

Magic made the difference between exile and homecoming, between honour and disgrace. On this, everything depended. She released his hand with a heavy breath.

"It will not be easy. I think you are used to steeling yourself against the weakness of pain. You must be prepared to endure a good deal more."

**

"Where on earth have you been?" Gaius's voice was full of exasperation. "You're needed at the gates."

Come to think of it, the note of urgency never left Gaius's voice of late. Camelot had been teetering on the verge of chaos for days now.

The king listened to no-one. The guards swapped helpless glances as one distasteful order followed another. They had always looked to Arthur in times like these. Oh they gave the king his due respect – he had built them a safe and wealthy realm after all. But respect was not love. It was not Uther whom grown men and women loitered outside the gates to see doing no more than stride out to receive a messenger or hear a guard's report. Arthur was real to them in a way his father never would be. In fact, Merlin had thought often enough, Camelot was a little bit in love with Arthur Pendragon, although Arthur had pretended not to notice, as if affection were somehow incompatible with his duty to them.

"I was in the North tower. I just came down to get a drink."

He poured himself a tall mug of ale. The harder he tried to focus his mind's eye, the more elusive his target became. The scrying bowl showed him nothing but Arthur, but past, present and potential were incurably muddled. He hoped that relaxing his gaze with drink might give him the clarity he needed.

"Merlin! The Druid envoy must be allowed to see the king. The consequences could be catastrophic if he is turned away again."

Merlin gulped the ale and topped up his mug. The North tower was quiet, overlooking the empty parade grounds. If he could just clear his mind enough, he only needed a glimpse where the shape of the rocks or the angle of the sunlight might tell him which direction Arthur had gone in.

"Arthur's loss changes everything. You must see this, Merlin. The Druids have no hope for clemency now, no hope for a different future. If the prisoners are not released, the magical outcasts will rise up as they never have before. Even Camelot may fall."

And still a persistent instinct in the back of Merlin's mind half expected Arthur to stride into the room, swaggering and resolute and ready to ride off to the rescue. Arthur was always part of the solution. Merlin had never had to choose before.

Gaius's voice softened. "Merlin, perhaps you can see nothing because there is nothing to see. A few missing pages from a book is not the proof that you want it to be. Arthur was never afraid of danger. He tested his luck. In the name of honour, he tested his luck, all his life. It is not a betrayal to accept that, just once, it might have turned against him."

Gaius had served the king most of his life, and other masters before him. In his heart, Arthur was just one loyalty among many.

"Camelot has got hundreds of men to defend it. Hundreds of guards and trained knights," Merlin said. "Arthur only has me."

**

Arthur lurched down onto his knees on the silty shore as his legs went from under him.

He had never known what magic felt like. It had seemed to pass through him, striking its object without any direction from his hand or mind. A sword always roused a sense of potency in his grasp, even when he had merely picked it up for a drill with no opponent in sight. There was some mystery that its steel retained, a residue of past battles, that radiated instantly into his body. And yet magic was inert. Even when he'd halted that giant mill wheel a matter of inches above Merlin's head, he hadn't felt an inkling of power in his hands.

But now that the magic was leaving him, the loss hurt him in every limb. He wiped his muddy hands on his thighs as the shivering set in. He was cold, always cold, and the water that came from the spring was like snowmelt, tasting of the grave. His body was a stranger to him now. It obeyed his commands reluctantly, or not at all. It had taken an act of will to make his legs stagger the modest distance back to the shore.

The boat that had brought him was gone. He liked to think he could improvise another if he had to, except that the island was all rock and mist and scrubby bushes, its few stumpy trees full of rot. Having seen the enchantment the water was under, he would have thought twice about venturing into it even at his strongest. He did not think he could cross it now.

"Come, my son." The island's mistress appeared, swift and silent, emerging from the mist behind him. Though she vanished often, leaving him to spend almost all of the long days alone, when she returned it was as if she had never gone far, like a gaoler unseen on the other side of a door. "We must measure your progress."

In her hand was a dead leaf, and inside it crouched a spider, its legs making nervous, angry twitches. Arthur held out his hand. Perhaps this time the creature would live.

"Close your eyes," she said. "Make yourself calm. Your power must rise to the surface so that we can observe what is left of it."

Arthur had seen enough battles to know how to banish unwanted thoughts from his mind. He pictured Camelot's walls, and his bed which, when Merlin was not too distracted or too piqued to see to it properly, was the perfect warmth for an instant sense of homecoming. He eliminated everything else.

"I'm ready."

She flicked the leaf. The startled spider leapt down into Arthur's open palm, tensing to sink in its fangs, and Arthur fought not to withdraw his hand to safety. It was over in an instant. In the blink of an eye, the spider was gone, vanished into a drift of quickly settling ash. Arthur had not even felt it.

It had been even quicker than the last time, and still he had not used the slightest will to make it happen. Being under threat brought out of him a power that he simply could not control.

The woman gently tilted his hand so that the ash slid off it. "I fear that we still have a long way to go."

If he had been back at home, and if this had not been the most dreadful secret of his life, he would have told Merlin about it, for the chance to hear how it sounded outside his own head. And Merlin would have said, like he always did, that there had to be another path, apart from the obvious, painful one. And Merlin would have been wrong, and Arthur would have gone off to do it anyway, but with a new sense of resolution. And, somehow, it would all have turned out all right.

"Then we have no time to waste," he told her. "Get out your knife and your cups and this time don't hold back. I will drive this thing out of me. Even magic can be beaten."

**

The water showed Arthur. Arthur, lounging back in his chair at the end of a long tournament day, recently stripped of his armour with the hair around his face still damp and disordered from the washcloth. A little drunk on victory, he sometimes forgot his lofty place, and his smile became the smile of an equal, even a friend. That particular look gave Merlin a longing he never felt otherwise, to be more than what he was, and he would go around the room straightening the tapestries or rearranging the clothes in the cupboard, so that he could stay without either of them needing to think of an excuse.

The spell had shown Merlin nothing that he did not already know. It showed the past – months and months worth of moments, all of them lost to him now, unless he could bend his magic to his will and unblind his vision. He had discovered nothing new except a bowl-shaped boat lodged in thick reeds that held no meaning for him.

Ale had not helped. The truth draught had not helped. A ruby prised from one of the king's goblets had not helped. Moonlight had not helped. Owl feather had not helped. Forty drops of his own blood had not helped. Sleep had not helped, and nor had three days without it.

His scrying eye had been blinded. He could not see Arthur because all he could see was Arthur.

**

He did not know where the soup came from. The only sign of life on the island was the harsh bird's cry he heard from time to time, that and the toadstools. But he ate what she gave him because it was part of the cure.

The heat and fortitude from the meal faded quickly, and in its aftermath the witch did her work. She had a green stone shaped like a flat river pebble which she passed over the lines of his body. The cold of it sliced like a blade as its thin edge went down his sternum, smooth against his bare skin. She traced it between each of his ribs, fitting it into the groove, up his left arm and down his right to the place where the rag was tied. The stone went three times around the crown of his head, down over his nose, mouth and chin. She drew the magic under his skin to a single place where it could be removed. Some days he could very nearly feel the path of it travelling through his veins.

The knife was hard to endure. The pain was not so great. The struggle was in forcing himself to let it happen; a warrior had no acquaintance with surrender. From his wrist almost to his elbow, his arm was cinched in a tourniquet. Under it lay scabbed incisions circled with black bruises that disgusted him every time she unwrapped it to carve a new one into him.

She found a fresh place on the inside of his arm, in between two older wounds, their dark scabs girdled with bruises. The blade looked delicate next to the girth of his forearm. But he knew its bite well.

"Look away, my son."

He did not. As swiftly as the spider might have done, she sliced him open, a deep, intricate cut like a fine embroidery stitch. She held out a wooden cup to catch the flowing blood. Arthur watched the curse of magic coming out of him.

He thought of what he had done to the spiders, and the mill wheel, and a dozen other objects. He thought of what else he might have done. His temper, in the rare moments he really let it take hold of him, was brutal. What damage could he have wreaked on Morgana when her tongue at its most spiteful struck him somewhere tender? What if the sense of impotence that only his intractable father could produce in him had spilled over into magic? Lancelot would have died ten times over at the height of Arthur's one-time passion. And what if Merlin, infuriating Merlin, laughing in one of their practice sessions as if swordplay were a game when every day of their lives it made the difference between comfort and slavery for the kingdom, and life and death for its prince-

He could have turned any one of them to ash and watched them blow away in the wind.

Instead, he watched the blood flow into the cup, and his only regret was that he could not afford to lose more of it, faster, until he bled himself clean.

**

"Merlin-"

The voice called to him in the depths of unintelligible dreams. He was needed. Someone wanted him.

"Merlin! Merlin, wake up. You have to help me!"

He sat up, still half asleep, disappointed. In dreams, he could forget what had happened and return to another, less troubled time.

He dragged aside the chest which the tension in the castle had recently impelled him to barricade inside the door. Morgana's eyes had the feverish light that her visions left there, and she seized his arm the moment she stepped into the room. Her movements were jerky with panic and he heard in every breath how her heart raced in her chest. His senses trusted her, even if his mind was suspicious.

"I saw him." Her hushed voice shook with the same tremor that she was squeezing into his arm. "Merlin. In my dream. I saw him. He was – it was so real I could have touched him."

Sleep had left something innocent in her eyes, as if some relic of kindness in her heart had brought her here in spite of her conscious will, and he wanted so very badly to believe her.

"Where did you see him?" He couldn't keep the desperation from his voice. "Just tell me where he is."

"I don't know what I saw. There was blood. A black bird. A dead tree. So much blood."

She could be lying, but to what purpose? He gripped her shoulders hard. "You have to try."

"Water, misty water and boat." Merlin had seen that much in the scrying bowl. "Then I saw the knife cut him. I woke up too soon. I couldn't see. I tried, I tried."

This time he put his hands on either side of her face, not gently. "Think of him. Concentrate on what you saw. Tell me where he is."

"Merlin, he's gone. You know he's gone."

He whispered the scrying spell, hurling it into her mind with all his might. Her eyes snapped open, overwhelmed, already losing their focus. Trembling overtook her and she started to sink down in a faint. But with the last of her strength she had already thrown out her arm, unequivocally, in one direction.

Merlin caught her as she fell and drew her to the chair by the fire.

South-west. A reed-fringed lake he had seen amongst his visions. By the time she woke, Merlin was long gone, cutting through dark, pathless woods, the pack bumping on his shoulder as he ran.

**

 

Arthur no longer knew how many days he had spent on the island.

He slept so much that time seemed to pass in trickles and sudden spurts, like grain through a clogged spout. When he woke in darkness, he did not even trouble with the struggle to sit up. He slept by the spring, so he could reach out and quench his terrible thirst without needing to move, though the price of drinking that dark water was a depth of cold that penetrated to the marrow. Other times he woke in daylight, when the mist was little more than a damp taste in the air, and forced himself to walk about the island, following either the flat route that led back towards the shore, or the steep inland path that rose up to the rocky heights at its centre.

It was difficult to be sure when the landscape was monotonously similar, but he thought his range was getting shorter. Two days ago, he had torn a strip off the rag that wound up past his elbow now, and tied it to a bush when he turned back. The next day, he had not reached it before his racing heart and the agony in his head had told him he had gone too far already.

He was not even sure of his senses any more. One evening, emerging from muddy dreams, he had stumbled along the inland path, needing movement to shake off the shadowy sense of terror that had woken him. The dizziness already taking its hold, he had come to the edge of a grotto shaped out of the escarpment. In it stood a tree, tall and black, devoid of leaves but standing straight, untainted by the rot that crumbled the trunks of the others. The woman was speaking words to it. Arthur could have sworn it. Her hand spread out on its bark in what looked like nothing less than a caress. Reaching for a buttress to steady himself, Arthur rustled the bush beside him. From the very top of the tree, in a burst of feather and sinew, a black bird swooped down at him. He saw its eye for an instant, a knowing eye, an eye that knew what it was to kill. He fell down as he lunged away from it, and something must have struck his head. When he woke again, he was back by the spring, alone, and a furtive looking moon had come out.

He had never known weakness like this, never under the most grievous battle wounds, never even in his last childhood illnesses. Had his strength been so dependent upon magic that its withdrawal left him less than half a man? Camelot deserved better than what remained of him now. For the first time, it occurred to him that the enchanted waters he had crossed over to get here might never be crossed back again.

**

The boy had seen no strangers passing through, but a week ago his mother had found a foreign coin on the threshold which no-one could explain.

Even though she had the harried look of a widow, and no man to protect her except her son, she showed it to Merlin with no misgivings. The coin was Camelot's, with Uther's stern likeness on one face.

She was clearly baffled when he clasped her hand around it, robbed for a moment of speech and then babbling his gratitude. He left her three more like it. He could have left every coin in his possession and it wouldn't have been enough. He barely even felt the days' journey on his feet, only looking down in surprise every so often to cast a spell to seal a new hole in his shoes. Distance was an abstract concept. Arthur had come this way, and Merlin was going to bring him back.

**

Death held no terror for Arthur. He had conquered that in his youth. A general could not lead men into battle unless he showed them he had something more than mere human endurance. So now, bit by bit, he surrendered himself to its cold embrace. If he was to die, he would do it as a man and not a sorcerer.

His right side was numb and cold from the ground. Each time he tried to shift onto the other, his left arm reminded him sharply that it was far too tender with wounds to bear any weight. He longed to taste something living – an apple, a mug of milk – one last time. He was ready for his fate, but part of him did not want this nether world to be the last thing he saw.

He had failed another test, shrivelling a spider to a husk even though he was not sure he was quick enough to crush it with his hand any longer. Perhaps, after all, magic could not be drained away like bad water from a marsh. Even if he could be cured, Camelot held no place for a crippled prince who had once been a sorcerer. It was not that he doubted the kingdom's charity. The people would care for him, even let him hold a sceptre at ceremonial occasions like the idiot second son of the king of Mercia a generation ago. But as long as he lived, they in their sentimentality would not raise another to take his place. With an aging king and no heir fit to succeed him, they would lay themselves open to the ambitions of neighbouring powers. His fate would be to watch Camelot fall, and that he could not do.

Arthur did not wish to die, but good sense told him that all other outcomes were fantastical. He was not afraid. He had come close enough to his doom before to accept that he was not immortal. It was only that, amongst the visions of a bloody battlefield or a heroic stand at Camelot's gates, he had never expected to have to face it alone.

He called on any unearthly power he had left in him, and thought of one selfish wish.

**

The border between sleep and waking had got so faint that he was not sure which side of it he was on when he heard Merlin's voice calling his name. He assumed, since it was what he had been thinking of when he lost his grip on consciousness, that it was a dream, and so he let it have its way. He was back in his bed. It would be a holiday, with no duties to be done. When he opened his eyes, Merlin would be going around the room, building the fire up against the chill, setting things in place. He would angle the chair slightly crooked by the table to give Arthur something to complain about as soon as he woke. Arthur would find some other tasks for him, a loose nail or a stubborn cobweb, to make sure he didn't leave. In fact, Arthur would be injured, so that Merlin would have to sit on the side of the bed and hold a bowl of soup for him, or pass him torn pieces of bread, and probably prattle while he did it. Arthur didn't much care what he chose for a subject: the more pointless it was, the more certain he would be that everything was back to normal. When he took the bread in his dream, the sensation of living flesh as their fingers brushed was so vivid it made him ache.

The voice came again.

When he opened his eyes, the moonless night showed him hardly anything, except a soft orange glow throwing the bushes into silhouette. Anywhere else he would have thought it looked like torchlight. But it couldn't be. There was nothing on this water-logged island that could be made to burn. He slept, and closed his mind to the lies of visions.

**

He knew that Arthur was not dead because every now and then he murmured some delirious nonsense about bread or a chair. The cold of him suggested otherwise. Nowhere that Merlin touched on him was any less cold than the rock under his knees. He didn't even start to shiver until Merlin had rubbed some heat into his cheeks and neck. Once Merlin's hand had got steady enough to risk magic, he drew blankets of heat over them both.

He could not have imagined that Arthur, who set such great store in a prince's duty to carry himself like a prince, could neglect himself like this. Shunning the foul-feeling water from the spring, he got his own by magic and washed away the accumulated dirt and the dark smudges of blood. Little could be done for the horrific web of wounds on Arthur's arm, except to clean them and bind them afresh. He took the spare shift and tunic from his pack and laboriously traded them for the filthy clothes Arthur wore, which he pinned under a rock where the spring water could run through them.

Then, since he could not make Arthur wake, he took a deep breath and told himself to sleep. He was very likely exhausted from all those uncomfortable naps huddled among tree roots, from day after day moving at a run. His head was full of hysterical thoughts, like how he was never going to let Arthur out of his sight again, even if it meant sleeping on a cot in his room and enchanting his horse so it only moved on Merlin's command.

He thought about the first thing he would say to Arthur – apart, of course, from the embarrassing, choked things he had already said when he had dropped the torch in the dirt and clutched Arthur's icy hand in the fiercest grip of his life, touched his face, touched his cold mouth – in the morning. But no matter how he put it, he couldn't find the words to express everything that he wanted.

**


	3. Chapter 3

"What do I have to do to get rid of you, Merlin?"

Arthur had come out of his dreams to the certainty that his world had been set right again. The gnawing cold in him had finally been forced to thaw. He'd been sleeping comfortably, with his body loose as could be, no longer hunched in on himself like a man with a gut wound. He knew without opening his eyes that the bony thigh under his cheek belonged to Merlin.

With consciousness, however, had come unwelcome realisation. Merlin had come because Arthur had wished for it. He had magic in him still, stronger than ever. All of this had been for nothing, and now he had brought Merlin into his nightmare.

"A bit more than sending your horse back with blood all over the saddle. What was it? Some poor squirrel?" His glanced at the bindings on Arthur's arm. "If you had to use your own, perhaps we'd better get you some archery lessons."

Arthur sat up abruptly so he could put his arm out of view. It was only as he moved that he realised that the source of his profound contentment had been Merlin's hand, moulded around the side of his neck, settled inside his clothes, doing nothing more than communicate warmth and attention. It fell away as he moved, and the ice came back into his skin where it had touched him.

"Merlin, the day you can pick up a water jug without putting someone's life at risk, then we'll talk about what I need lessons in."

Merlin was looking at him oddly, not with the cheerful impudence that was usually a permanent part of his expression. It made Arthur uncomfortable. He went to scratch at the itch under his collar that had grown worse with each gritty day sleeping on dirt, but he found his tunic changed and his skin scrubbed clean. Under his clothes ran an eager, vulnerable shiver.

"We should go," Merlin said and stood up.

The wrench between what he wanted and what he had to do never got easier, but at least this one was a familiar dilemma to put right. He had less right than ever to return to Camelot. He would stay until he had purged himself of sorcery. And Merlin had no reason to stay with him.

"No. You should go."

"The thing about you being dead, Arthur, is that a dead prince doesn't have any servants. Does he?" He had picked up his own pack and was looking around for what was left of Arthur's. "Come on. When we get back home I suppose you'll be able to order me around again, but until then you can't blame me for making the most of it."

He grinned his old grin. It made Arthur feel that everything might still be all right, only to remember that it couldn't be, and he hated it.

"You heard what I said."

He pulled his pack out from under the bush before Merlin could lay hands on it.

"I'll just tell your father that I left his one and only son half dead in the middle of an enchanted lake, shall I? I may as well take my own head off on the way home and save him the trouble."

"Merlin, I am telling you to go."

Merlin's lips were cracked with exposure, and the tenacious skeleton of a leaf clung in the side of his hair. So far from the castle's daily routines, so far from civilisation, he could have outrun Arthur's power over him. "Not a chance. Not unless you come with me."

He wandered off a few paces, looking around, as if giving Arthur some privacy to fumble his way to his feet, which he did. "You've got some important royal business here, have you? Here?"

Arthur had to steady himself on a rock as he rose.

"Nothing you need to know about."

Though Merlin had no idea how to defer to anyone, Arthur thought he'd earned Merlin's respect. It had not been easy. If he did not have the power in his father's kingdom to be the champion that Merlin wanted him to be, he had intervened when duty allowed him, and sometimes when it didn't, at no small cost to his pride. He had tried to do what was honourable, even when circumstances prevented him from doing what was right. Whether Merlin gave him credit for any of this, he could never be sure, but he knew one thing. If he revealed that he had magic in him, after all the deaths and all the misery that had come from his father's policy on sorcery, he would be throwing away whatever meagre regard Merlin had for him.

Standing in front of him, Merlin's face was as solicitous as his hand had been earlier. "What happened to you, Arthur? Why did you leave?"

No, the last thing on earth Arthur could do was tell him. The shame went deep enough when the only revulsion he had to deal with was his own.

"If I'd wanted you here," Arthur said instead, in the voice he used on incompetent knights, "don't you think I would have asked you to come?"

Merlin opened his mouth and closed it again. Finally, it looked like Arthur had got through to him. He nodded, something between a nod and a grimace. "I see. I didn't know- Yes, I see."

Things would never quite be the same between them after that, Arthur thought. Once, at home, he would have softened an unavoidable wound with a gruff command and a hand on Merlin's shoulder that he could convince himself was a regal favour. It would have been all right to part on awkward terms, because in the castle they were never far apart for long, and the next morning or even after dinner they might have stumbled into another one of those unpredictable moments when he would meet Merlin's eyes for no particular reason and feel a sudden and deep certainty that everything in his life was just as it should be. In this place, however, he could expect no such graces.

"You're right," Merlin said in a defeated sounding hush that Arthur didn't like at all. "I should have realised. Take care of yourself."

Those words were not what Arthur wanted to stand as the last between them, not when Merlin's was the last friendly voice he might hear. But Merlin was disappearing into the scrub, heading towards the shore that Arthur could no longer cross. Arthur could not call him back; he knew that even as he drew breath to do it. The day was advancing. The witch would be here soon, and above all he did not want Merlin to see what he let her do to him.

He did not want to ruin the clean clothes Merlin had put on him, so he found a clear patch of rock and lay down on it. The cold rose up immediately to grip him like vicious hands.

**

Merlin had felt it since the moment he had stepped onto the enchanted water. A deep sense of magic misaligned. Something dark and patient was sucking the energy from the water, from the soil, from the very air. Whatever it was lay inland, towards the centre of the island.

He could not be sure whether what afflicted Arthur had the same source. He could only start with the island, and wait for Arthur to come to his senses.

Following the shore around, he sought a different route inland, and in the end had to forge his own path through the thorny bushes that fought him every step. The morning was unnaturally quiet, as if nothing lived here that moved. He had watched for the signs of a predator that might account for it, and detected nothing. The emptiness here was something else entirely.

The flicker of wings was so remarkable in the stillness that even in the corner of his eye Merlin caught the movement. He quickly turned his path towards where the bird had disappeared, giving up on his battle with the bushes and parting them with a spell.

He approached the grotto warily. In it was a tree, straight and bare, a little taller than Merlin's height, which in this place made it remarkable. It was more than height that set the hair on Merlin's arms rising, though. The tree, with its smooth trunk the colour of granite, looked like it had grown here no more than a fortress might naturally grow on the crest of a hill. He couldn't say what was wrong with the tree, but felt that if he did know, it wouldn't be something he liked.

Without quite knowing why, he backed away. What he was usually called upon to master was a beast which attacked with speed and size and furious claws. The deadly stealth he sensed here unnerved him.

And then he saw the bird. Joined in colour to the topmost branch, it had been invisible until it moved.

"What are you?" he demanded.

His heart was clamouring with a fear he should not have felt. The black bird launched off its perch, coming straight for him, and as he threw up his arm to deflect it, he understood where the marks on Arthur's cheek had come from. He raised a shocked hand to his ear and felt blood. The creature had clawed him, not in the mere posturing of territorial defence, but with the malicious intention to wound. As it wheeled around and swooped again, it aimed straight for Merlin's eyes. Anger rising, he threw up a shielding spell, but the bird pierced it like a patch of mist so that he had to throw himself to the ground to escape its talons.

As he looked up, the change in angle caught the tree in a new perspective. Now he knew why it had disturbed him. Faintly, under the bark, he could make out the contours of a man's torso, arms thrown up in defence contorting into frozen branches.

He glanced around to keep the bird in sight. A spell was ready on his tongue if it attacked again. Whatever else it was, and however it was connected to the bird, the tree was made of wood, and wood burned.

But before he could strike, the sound of shouting reached his ear. There was a cry, in the voice he least wanted to hear under threat. When it cut off, Merlin was already on the move, throwing spells in front of him to clear his way, ripping the earth bare to an arm-span on either side of where his feet fell.

**

On legs that felt every inch of his long journey, Merlin ran.

He should have known better than to leave Arthur alone – hadn't he just sworn to himself he wouldn't do it again? It was just that thing Arthur had said, after all of Merlin's sleepless nights, after the zig-zag of extremes between grief and hope and despair. That thing Arthur had said so coldly, as if letting Merlin think him dead had been a flippant decision, as if he didn't care or couldn't even imagine how every breath had hurt for the days when Merlin had thought he was lost forever. Normally, he knew how to deal with Arthur's occasional blind insensitivity. Arthur wasn't given to needing people, and couldn't be expected to understand how people needed him. Somehow Merlin had lost sight of this hard-learned truth. With Arthur alive and safe and asleep in his lap, he had let his imagination run away from him, thinking their reunion might mean something like as much to Arthur as it meant to him.

In the clearing by the spring, Arthur was struggling up from his knees. His left arm was soaked in blood, dripping from his fingers into the dirt, and in his other hand was a knife. Merlin clamped his fingers around the gushing wound and gripped hard.

"What happened? For heaven's sake, Arthur. Tell me what's doing this to you."

Arthur's eyes lifted up to him slowly, in the stupor of pain or something else.

"I couldn't let her do it," he slurred. "Not anymore. I told her if she touched me again I'd kill her. She did- she did it anyway."

Between keeping his hand over the wound and guiding Arthur to a place he could sit, Merlin tried to make sense of it all.

"A woman attacked you?"

"Not attacked. Not at first." Deeper and clumsier than the old ones, this wound was bleeding fast. "She was taking my blood."

Even knotted as tight as he could make it, Merlin's neck-cloth wasn't enough to staunch the flow. He watched the fabric grow heavy and dark until the first thin stream of blood escaped from beneath it.

"I wanted her to do it, Merlin. I let her. I had to get rid of it."

Arthur was leaning into him, eyes going vacant. The knife rolled onto the ground.

For a moment, Merlin's mind went completely blank with panic. "Stop it," he said. "Arthur, stop it!" Merlin was not going to lose him now. No matter what it took. He put his clean hand on Arthur's cheek and glared at him. "Keep talking to me. Who was this woman? Why was she taking your blood?"

Arthur turned his face away. That was all the chance Merlin needed. In a moment, he had sealed the skin over the gash with a whispered spell. The blood stopped welling up. His chest finally loosened enough to let out a sigh as he adjusted his neck-cloth around Arthur's upper arm and settled it over the unnaturally healed flesh. He re-tied it snugly now that it no longer needed to bite into the flesh.

Arthur's resilience was a force of nature. Once his body was freed from the trauma of blood loss, he slowly took hold of himself. Merlin could already see the beginnings of the familiar pattern. In a few more moments, his temporary helplessness would be banished as if it had never been. Only his eyes would retain the signs of injury.

"Now," said Merlin, a bit giddy with relief, now that Arthur was safe and all that remained was the familiar challenge of identifying the source of the threat and defeating it, together. "What did this woman want with your blood?"

Arthur looked him in the eye, but the effort it took was apparent to anyone who knew him.

"She was curing me of magic."

He said it like he might have disclosed something grave but unsurprising, like an ill-advised royal edict or another plot against the throne.

"There. Now you know."

 _"You?"_

Arthur's face shifted in the rare evasion of shame. "My father must never find out. It would destroy him. "

"Arthur. You don't have magic in you. You of all-"

"Shut up," Arthur snapped with a spite in it that said he had found false hope in this line of reasoning before. "There's a witch on this island. That's why I came here. Who is better qualified than a witch to recognise magic? So just for once spare me your well-meaning rubbish and don't try to tell me I've been imagining it. I've got it in me all right. She's draining it off with my blood. I'm going to beat it."

Merlin stopped to think, because it was clear that Arthur had sacrificed everything he had to this idea, and his mind could only be changed when he was willing to let it be.

"I'd say it's most likely magic she's using you for, Arthur. The only question is, what is she doing?"

"Merlin." Arthur pushed away the hand that had come to rest on his injured arm. "Don't try to fool yourself. I'm not who you thought I was. I'm one of them."

Merlin stood up, as stiffly as if he had his arms full of Arthur's heaviest weaponry.

"I think I've got a pretty good idea of who you are by now."

He put out his hand and left it there until Arthur sighed and used it to get to his feet.

"You see now why I can't go back to Camelot. Even if I didn't care about the shame, I could do too much damage. This – this _thing,_ it can't be trusted. As long as it's in me, I'm no better than a wolf or a monster."

That hurt.

"No, Arthur. No. You've got it all wrong. You don't understand magic at all. You see, Arthur, there's magic and there's magic. It can be used for good. You can heal a wound with it. You can make a broken plate mend itself. You can even clean the-"

"I said shut up!" Arthur was backing away as if what he'd heard was dangerous. "Where do you get these idiotic ideas? Clearly a servant's life is so sheltered you know nothing about anything that matters. Well I'll tell you something. My father was right to ban it. I only wish I could take back the times I've taken pity on a sorcerer. I'd burn them all if I could."

Merlin's balance faltered, like it did when hostile magic sapped his strength.

"Prove it," he threw out. "Go on. Show me what you can do. Let me see some of your spells then. Which ones do you know?"

Arthur said nothing at first. There was only the shiver of the wind picking up and a distant, sinister cry that must have come from the bird. It hung a long time in the damp air before it faded.

Arthur said quietly, "I brought you here."

"You-" As sudden as a greasy cup, Merlin's temper slipped out of his grasp. "You _brought_ me here? Arthur! Have you never strained your precious royal mind to think that maybe I'd been driving myself mad trying to find you? But oh no – it's all your doing. What is it you think I was doing before you _moved me about with your mind_? Sleeping till noon? Or just staring at a wall and waiting for orders?"

Arthur was not provoked in the least. He just looked sad and resigned.

"How else did you know where to find me? I was very careful not to leave a trail."

Merlin gaped at the unfairness of it. Morgana's secret was not his to tell.

"I knew." His hand made a fist in the air in front of his mouth, as if it could stop him saying what he was on the verge of saying. "I just knew."

Arthur shrugged. "Just like magic."

A gust of air whipped Merlin's hair against his skin. The wind was picking up the dirt and making it bite the skin of his hands and ankles. It came from the shore towards the centre of the island, where dark clouds were gathering. The cry came again, higher and shriller. Not the bird this time but a woman, and she was in distress.

Merlin recognised the sight of Arthur steeling himself to move towards the sound, ready to cast himself into danger, as if it meant nothing that Merlin had abandoned everything to come here and keep him safe.

"No-"

"You stay here," Arthur told him. "This is my responsibility to finish. In fact, I want you gone by the time I come back."

He walked away. Most likely not even knowing what he was going to do when he reached the woman and whatever worse creature was assailing her, he walked away, as if his supposed magic was just one more thing that divided the two of them into distinct and unbridgeable classes. As if it had made the chasm that lay between them even wider.

Merlin threw out his hand, the spell virtually spat out of his mouth, and from the ground in Arthur's path rose up a wall of grey stone, looming up taller than a man, rumbling as it emerged and making Arthur stop in his tracks.

" _That_ is what magic looks like," Merlin said, voice low and vibrating as he marched up to him. " _That_ is how I do magic. You can't even manage the buckles on your own armour without help - how on earth do you think you might have sorcery in you?"

He had no more than halted when Arthur seized his arms, an angry grip above the elbow that was not afraid of causing pain.

"There," Merlin continued more quietly as the look on Arthur's face reminded him that in winning this particular argument, he was going to lose a great deal more. "There. You see. Magic doesn't have to destroy things."

He scrutinised the neck of Arthur's shirt, afraid to look higher. He was dimly aware of three or four spells he could have used to loosen Arthur's grip, but the only way he wanted to escape his confinement was when Arthur chose to release him, in forgiveness.

"Don't. Arthur-"

Arthur had on that particular look that usually only his father could put there, a study in betrayal and deep-seated pain, a look that took his normally open temperament and turned him in on himself.

"You were there every time it happened. Every time."

Few people held Arthur's trust absolutely. Merlin had never forgotten how lucky he was to have it, or how easily it might one day be lost. Now, he watched it ebb away from him, and there was no point in saying how the secret had sat like a cyst in him, ready to burst under his skin, sending out spasms of pain at unexpected moments.

With everyone else he had cared about, he could have found a way to show it without the need for unreliable words. Gaius, his mother, Gwen, Will ... even Morgana in the grip of her worst visions had used to put her hand in his. But not Arthur. Arthur was inviolate, always aloof, forever out of Merlin's reach, never more so than now when he was close enough that Merlin could smell the blood he had shed, could feel the involuntary twitches in the muscles of his wounded arm.

The bird's cry sounded again, desolate and far away. Merlin knew now what Arthur's death would do to him. He realised for the first time that turning Arthur into an enemy might be even worse.

He said the only thing he could think of. "You let me think you were dead."

"That," Arthur told him, raising an angry finger against him like a sword point, "is hardly the same thing."

"Why? Are your secrets different because you're a prince?"

"Do you think I enjoyed it?" The strained twist of his mouth reminded Merlin of what he'd spent all his life learning. Lying was a lonely business. Lonelier every day he'd had to do it. Though he'd never stopped hating it, he'd got used to it with time; the ache between his ribs had weakened. But for Arthur, whose men trusted him with their lives, betrayal was new, and so was the exile it brought. Arthur added, "I had to do it. Even if – even if it hurt people."

He really didn't understand.

"Your father gathered up what was left of your armour. He put it on a pyre and burned it."

That made Arthur fall silent. It would be like him to have made all sorts of wrong assumptions about how Camelot would shoulder its grief and carry on in his absence, just as Arthur himself would have made himself do if it had been someone else who'd been lost.

"It took hours before the last plates had melted out of shape. Hundreds of people were watching and none of them spoke a word until the smoke had all blown away. Grown men were wiping their noses on their sleeves. Children held each other's hands and – you could hear it from inside the castle, Arthur. Your whole kingdom crying its heart out. It's not nothing, what you did. Even if you had reasons for it. You're important to people. You're-"

He had to fix his eyes on a messy spike of hair behind Arthur's ear and hold back the memory of what that day had done to him, watching from the window of Arthur's chamber and half-dead himself with the certainty that the world could no longer hold anything good outside its walls.

And then, because he couldn't really see how it could make anything worse, he lifted his hand and gripped onto Arthur's tunic, right over the rise and fall of his chest, where his heart would be beating, and thought what a fool he'd been not to realise sooner how completely destructive it was to care too much about one person.

"I didn't want that," Arthur said in an uncharacteristically small voice. "I wouldn't do it for _attention,_ to make people- Merlin, you know I wouldn't."

Unable to put his thoughts in words, Merlin could only shake his head, clutching Arthur's shirt until it strained, certain that if he did or said anything else he'd lose control of himself entirely. There was no menace left in Arthur's grip on him. His good hand rubbed Merlin's shoulder in a clumsy attempt at comfort.

"You idiot," he was saying, gently, sounding a bit baffled. "You idiot. I'm sorry."

He touched the side of Merlin's face, as swiftly as testing a pot not long off the fire, and Merlin had yet another worrying realisation about what Arthur meant to him.

The wind threw a dead leaf onto Arthur's face, making him turn away to let it blow off. On either side of the shelter of Merlin's wall, the bushes were bending inland under the growing force of the storm. There were currents of magic being drawn inwards too, Merlin could feel them now. His joints ached with malevolent magic. There was no question of investigating the source of it. He had to get Arthur away from here. Tired to the bones with panic, confusion and grief, he had to get Arthur somewhere sheltered, somewhere he could rest and know that Arthur was safe.

"Come home," Merlin said to him. "Right now."

Arthur glanced over his shoulder, towards the worst of it, not looking daunted.

"Arthur, leave it. Whatever it is, just leave it."

Pulling free of Merlin's grip, Arthur drew back. "You're afraid. I thought you said magic didn't have to be dangerous. What is it you're not telling me?"

Merlin didn't know for a certainty that what he felt at work here meant them harm, but every instinct he had was telling him not to take chances, and above all else he was not taking any chances with Arthur.

"The magic here, it's twisted, like- It's like it's sucking the life out of the air. You have to trust me."

The look he got was the one Arthur wore when his father appealed as a last resort to his sense of filial duty, the one that said that reducing the argument to a test personal affection was the most unfair of tactics. And it was unfair, Merlin thought, because Arthur was loyal to a fault, and it was a weakness Merlin didn't ever want to see him lose.

Merlin sighed. "So help me, if you do anything stupid. If you get yourself hurt-"

A rumble came from the centre of the island, vibrating into their ankles and knees. It had the deep grind of thunder in it, but something else too, like the creak of wood under severe strain. Mingled in it was the cry of a man in anguish.

"Have a little faith," Arthur said airily, a touch of his old swagger coming back to him. He skirted around Merlin's wall without giving it a second glance, striding towards the centre of the chaos. "Come on. Bring your magic."

**

Arthur followed the force of the wind and the path of the dark clouds, climbing where they led. Action felt good down the length of his body, no matter that his racing heart was a reminder that he was in no condition to push himself to his usual limits. His limbs were his own again, free of the taint of magic, and mortality had never felt better.

He pulled up at the edge of the grotto, hardly surprised to find himself at the place where he’d seen the sorceress come, where the black bird had swooped on him as if it meant to kill.

The storm was fiercest here, wind howling in his ears and whipping the branches of the bushes about so that they whistled like arrows and beat the ground. Where the tree had been stood a man, dark featured with ragged black hair like badly tended feathers, shoulders that looked trained to weaponry, and murder written all over his face. On her knees before him, the witch struggled to escape his iron grip on her wrist, desperately prising his fingers off. It was only his grasp that prevented her escape, for although the man's upper body had thrown off of its enchanted shape, his legs were still confined in the trunk of the tree, so that human flesh melded into black wood just under his hipbones.

"Don't go near him," said Merlin at his shoulder, his tone telling Arthur that this was exactly the sort of perilous magic he had feared to find.

The man looked only a few years Arthur's senior, but something in the depths of his eyes appeared much older. The tendons of his neck and arm stood out like rope strands under strain. Between his teeth as he snarled at his captive, dripping down his chest, was blood that must have been Arthur's. A tree was inert, hardly capable of possessing malice, but in the hybrid creature before him, in the groan of wood, he sensed a fury deep and merciless and patient as the earth.

Arthur said, "Let her go."

The man looked up, but not at Arthur. His eyes, shadowed as a hollow log out of which any black night might crawl, fixed on Merlin. He raised his free hand and flung it out with a spell that crackled like split timber.

Merlin's spell met it halfway in a bloom of magic that threw Arthur off balance. He checked the instinct to put himself in between them. Merlin looked fierce and unafraid, throwing off the uncertainty his slight build normally gave him in battle. He looked like a stranger, stirring in Arthur the anticipation and pride he felt when a new knight distinguished himself in his first conflict.

With another groan of wood, the sorcerer twisted his body and wrenched his thighs free of the trunk that imprisoned him, bark falling away like shed clothes until only his calves remained imprisoned.

"Have pity," the woman implored, and shuddered as if what he was driving into her wrist was more than mere physical strength.

"Weren't you listening?" Merlin said in an unexpectedly deadly voice. "You were told to let her go."

The sorcerer glared at him. From the ground by their feet burst a tree root, moving as fast as the switch of a dragon's tail. Splattering earth specks all around, it wrapped around Merlin's neck in a gruesome noose and tightened. Merlin's lips moved soundlessly as he tore at the root with his fingers, shaping impotent spells. Quicker than a thought, Arthur's knife had left his hand, hurtling on the wind towards the sorcerer's heart. With hardly more than a glance, the man halted it mid-flight and let it tumble to the ground. Arthur's wounded arm gave a pointed throb, reminding him that he was in poor condition to match even an ordinary adversary.

Merlin's face was a flushed grimace, horrible wet sounds in his choked throat. The woman strained against her captor's grip. Arthur threw himself forward, rolled painfully on his bad arm, snatched up his knife and rose with the point of it under the sorcerer's chin.

"If you want to keep your head on your shoulders," he said, his vision fading to black and then resolving itself from the change in altitude, "release him."

One good thrust would finish him. The man's empty eyes met his: whatever he had been a short time ago – the tree, the tree's prisoner, or something else – had not left him intact. Arthur lifted his elbow to finish it.

"No!" The woman reached up her hand in supplication.

From behind him came Merlin's voice, croaky and blessedly welcome. "It's all right."

A glance over his shoulder revealed the severed tree root lying on the ground, smoke and black sludge oozing from the stump it had been cut from. Merlin had only needed a moment's distraction to do it. Merlin, who got down on one knee to fix Arthur's broken bootlaces.

"He'll kill me if you let him," said the witch, not for an instant giving in to the man's grip on her. "I meant you no harm, my son."

She reached her free hand out to Arthur, dark threads of his blood in its fine creases, the bowl she had carried it in lying empty beside her, and he took a step back to avoid her touch. The wizard pulled her closer to take a grip in her hair that bent her head back.

"I'm not going to tell you again," Arthur said. “Let her go.”

This time, the sorcerer's attention slipped between Arthur and Merlin, as if assessing which one of them was in control of his fate. Against the powerful magic he had seen and the unnatural strength of trunk and roots, Arthur would have liked to be wielding a mightier weapon than the short knife he held; the very earth beneath his feet seemed part of the sorcerer's being. He did the only thing he could do, and bluffed in the voice of a king who knew himself to be unassailable.

"The next warning you get will be the edge of my blade."

There was a shift in the weight in his hand. When he glanced down, his fingers clasped the hilt of a sword, gold strands twined among the iron on the hilt, gleaming in the niggardly light. It looked sharp enough to sing if it sliced the air.

The sorcerer gave a low hiss. It was a handsome weapon, more than worthy of Arthur's hand. The woman fell still with a wary glance in Merlin's direction.

This time with real confidence, Arthur said, "You should show a man’s wisdom, if you want to live to be one again."

When he wearily opened his fingers to set her free, the woman drew back, swift and agile as her spiders had been.

"She is the one who should feel the edge of your weapon." The sorcerer spoke slowly. His voice had the hoarseness of long disuse, with a hollow sound to it, uneven gaps between his words like bricks laid by an untrained hand. "This woman is the very soul of treachery."

The fatigue in his voice told Arthur that the man's youth was deceptive, unnaturally preserved by his years under enchantment. He and the woman were both much older than they appeared.

"If you have a grievance, I will judge it," Arthur said. "You're the knight from Exeter, aren't you? Who came here in King Eldred's day to ask her to give you magic."

From the book, Arthur had imagined him as an upright man of war, not at all like this shifting, menacing presence that teased at all of Arthur's defensive instincts.

"Oh yes," the knight spat. "She gave me magic. And then cursed me when I tried to use it."

Her vulnerability thrown off now, the woman looked every inch a sorceress. "You snake! What did you use it for but seduction? It was a princess you wanted for your bed. My heart wasn't enough for you."

"Your heart, madam?" sneered the sorcerer. "You have none. I should know."

Her hand shot out like a loosed arrow, murderous magic at the tips of her fingers. The sorcerer moved too slowly: her spell grazed the inside of his turned shoulder and tore off a wide strip of skin. With a hiss of pain, he raised his good arm to retaliate, but Merlin's spell struck first, knocking her feet out from under her. Her anger turned on Merlin then. Arthur remembered how the spiders in his hand had been turned to ash by a spell too subtle for him to detect.

"Merlin!" It was like the mill wheel all over again. He threw himself forward, too late, too slow. Her magic was already unloosed. Merlin raised his hand against it. As it struck him, Merlin flew backwards into the bushes, a wound opening up across his chest, blood spattering as he fell.

It took an instant for Arthur to alter his course, raise his sword and bring it down. She turned in time to see its cutting edge come to a halt a finger-span from her cheek.

She ran her gaze down the blade and then looked him in the eye. "Don't kill me."

"I'll run you through if you've hurt him, woman or witch." From the flinch in her face, he saw she believed him. "Merlin. Say something. Say you're all right."

He kept his attention on her, and on the man too, who was staunching his wound with his hand and swaying unsteadily. Arthur's sword trembled slightly against the woman's cheek. He tightened his grip and told himself that it was going to be all right. Merlin had come through too many narrow escapes for this to be the end. Arthur couldn't imagine, couldn't let himself imagine, going back to Camelot without him. His heart thumped like a boot striking the inside of his ribs.

"Merlin?"

"Get up, wizard," the woman called out, not quite coldly enough to hide her fear.

Not now. Not when his exile was over, not when everything had turned all right, not when Merlin had let him in on the biggest secret he had, not when he hadn't even had a chance to let Merlin tell his story.

"Merlin!" It was the shout he used when he found his breakfast late, or his shirt not quite dry. If Merlin was all right, Arthur promised himself, he wouldn’t use it again. He'd learn to stop his temper running away from him.

From a cracking of branches, Merlin crawled forward, moving stiffly. Blood rimmed the tear across his shirt, but underneath it the wound had vanished.

"Don't worry." He sounded breathless but undamaged, the mocking gently familiar. "You won't have to carry your own pack all the way home."

Arthur knocked the sorceress onto the ground and used the tie from her cloak to bind her hands behind her. A new sense of urgency drove him, making his knots rough and tight. There was no time for this. He had to get Merlin off the island before anything happened that he'd never be able to forgive himself for.

When he stood up, Merlin had trussed the man's hands too, fastened to a cord that looped around his neck. It was a feeble restraint to hold against magic, but with his wound still bleeding thinly, the sorcerer looked more like a man, tired and betrayed and hungry. The storm that his transformation had stirred up had faded away to nothing more than glowering clouds.

"A wise man would tie her to a stone and throw her in the lake," the sorcerer told him. "I know better than anyone what she is, after all these years of darkness, staring at a world I couldn't touch through the half-blind eyes of a bird. Look what this woman's love has turned me into."

Kicking his feet free of the last shell of wood that restrained him, the first thing he did was fall to his knees.

"It was anger!" she rasped, breaking free of Arthur's grip as he raised her to her feet. "I cursed you in anger, and I have regretted it every day since. I had given you everything – half of my magic and all of my heart. Yet for you it was not enough. If you had laid the gifts I gave you at the feet of your princess, it would have destroyed me. So yes, I cursed you. And I have not left your side in thirty seven years. Since the accursed day I did this, I have searched out your cure, and finally I found it. I brought you the blood of a champion to bring you back your strength."

"Arthur's life for his." That was Merlin's voice, sounding cruel and unfamiliar. "That's your idea of love, is it? Leave her to him. Let them finish each other off."

"And you?" The man turned to Arthur shrewdly. "How do you judge it? What price should she pay for stealing the last years of my youth? She would have taken your life too, don't forget, and poured it all away to undo the crime she had committed."

Arthur thought on it. Love did twisted things, he knew that from the coldness in his father's heart that was the scar left on him by grief. But if he ever found it himself, he thought he would recognise it because it inspired him to be better than what he was, not worse. It should arouse a sense of refuge, a desire to protect and the humility to be protected, not an urge to destroy.

"Both of you talk about _love_ like it's just a reason to throw honour out the window. Just another excuse, like drunkenness."

And the man, after all, what had he been but ambitious at the expense of all honour? He had accepted the proof of this woman's affection, accepted the magic which was her unique gift, and bound himself to nothing in return. Love should never be taken for granted. Arthur knew that from going among the townspeople, who gave him their trust and obedience, their lives if Camelot were in need, and in return asked only for the small signs he had learned how to give to show that their devotion was reciprocated. It was a debt paid willingly on both sides, not forced, never demanded. One person was no different from a kingdom. A man in love ought to ask what he ought to give, not what he stood to gain. He thought of the pain his disappearance had caused in Camelot, and how he was going to repay every wasted tear when he was king, and he thought of the look on Merlin's face not long ago, that he wished he'd never seen, and wanted never to let go of.

"Well then?" said the man, as if impatient for a favourable decision.

Arthur said, "You have wronged each other, and it is too late to undo the damage. You will bear your grievances, both of you, and forget about revenge."

The woman's expression narrowed furiously, "You will leave me to the hands of a villain? He will kill me the moment your back is turned."

"If you can't make your peace," Merlin interrupted, "then I'll draw a line on a map right through this place. You can have the land west of here, as far as the mountains. He will live in the east. And in the middle, where the island is, there will be a line a thousand paces wide that neither of you will ever cross. Are you happy with that?"

"Oh by all means draw a line," she scoffed. "Imprison us with ink, will you?"

"My ink will hold you well enough."

A shiver went along Arthur's spine. In Merlin's startling eyes was a peril he had never seen before, but of course Arthur had never seen him openly matched against another of his kind. The angles of his face made him look wild and even, for the instant his words held sway, menacing. Arthur believed him.

The two lovers shot bitter glances at one another, full of unspoken threats, but neither of them disagreed.

"No?" Merlin said. "You don't want to be parted? Then you can make your peace."

As soon as his ties were loosened, the man bent his head into his hands. Now that the shock of liberation and the outburst of decades of rage had been given time to pass, he looked as if he wanted nothing better than to sleep. The woman appeared more than a match for him as she struggled subtly against her bindings, and Arthur suspected she would be the one more likely to strike in cold blood the next day or the day after.

"You will swear oaths on it," Arthur said. "And you will keep to them."

He would administer the oaths as swiftly as he could. This island was poisonous, down to the last grain of dirt under his feet. He could virtually taste it in the air now, in a way he had not noticed before. This was a place for the dead. He wanted to get away. He was alive, and Merlin had come all this way for him. There was a great deal he needed to do.

"Arthur?" Merlin's hand was under his good arm, making him aware that he was unsteady on his feet, numb down the tendons of his legs and arms. He lowered the sword and let Merlin take it from him. "You were right," he wanted to say, but settled for a hand on Merlin's shoulder instead.

**


	4. Chapter 4

"How long have you been doing it?" Arthur asked as they stood on the shore of the island. The mist seemed weaker than before, retreating to the reed beds and the shadows like a timid creature, and almost letting through the sight of land, though the daylight was starting to dwindle.

Merlin told him, "Since I was four. At least that's the first my mother can remember."

He said something to the water to make it go still. Out on top of it, the cold rose like spears jabbing at the flesh.

"You know I should probably have your head off," Arthur mentioned unhappily, a little later.

Since they were crossing the deepest part of the lake at that point, walking on the water's very surface so that only the protection of Merlin's magic kept him from drowning in its enchanted depths, the observation didn't come off as threatening as it might have.

"And I guess it would be my duty to let you do it, too," Merlin replied.

He sounded blithely hypothetical about both the punishment and the whole idea of duty. Apart from the fact that they were defying the laws of nature, it was hard to believe that anything had changed.

"I'd never use it against you," Merlin said, and with his thin hand in Arthur's as they managed the careful step back onto solid earth, it was difficult to imagine he ever could. "I never have. Except once."

Arthur looked for penitence or fear in his face and found amusement instead. "I can improvise a set of stocks out here, Merlin. Don't think I can't. When did you-" Of course. "Right at the beginning. When I bested you in the cart-wright's workshop. I knew you couldn't be fighting fairly."

Merlin picked up a dead branch. The tip of it blazed to life, making a wavering, bright space in the fading light. "I was fighting for my life, for all I knew then."

"No you weren't."

It was hard to recall it now, but there had been a time when he would have hurt Merlin, and not even been ashamed of it. Arthur hardly recognised the brute he had been then, flushed with youth's blind confidence that divided the world into sources of threat and sources of glory, looking on life as a quest to gain more proofs of his own greatness. There was not much in his life he was ashamed of.

"We have to move on," Arthur said. "I won't make camp within sight of that place."

There were pine needles underfoot as they began to cross the forest Arthur had come through what seemed like a very long time ago. The scent of them cleansed his lungs of the accumulated dirt from the island. The smell of living things came back to him. Huddled among the tree roots were tentative green blades that promised flowers. These were details he could not remember noticing before, touched with colour in the twilight by the glow of Merlin's torch ahead of him.

"The attack in Ealdor," he heard himself say aloud as they made their way uphill through the trees. "Your friend was never a sorcerer. Was he?"

"Will was a good friend," Merlin said after a while. "He didn't have a magical bone in his body."

The going was hard after that, climbing sharp rocks slick with moss as they approached the ridge above the valley where the lake lay. His pride protested only quietly when Merlin's hand under his shoulder guided him up a tricky stretch, sparing the strain on his bad arm.

"I had strange dreams, the night before the lady Sophia vanished," he said as they descended the easier slope in full darkness. "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

Merlin turned back as if to ask whether he really wanted to know. He did. The explanation took some time. His dream had not been so far wrong. There had been a weightless feeling in it, and arms around him, but in the dream the arms had not been Merlin's.

They had covered a couple of miles at least before he was satisfied that he had got to the bottom of every inexplicable miracle he could think of, up to and including the burning mill wheel.

Then, since there was no sign of habitation anywhere around, they ate some bread from Merlin's pack and sought shelter in the hollow of a fallen tree trunk. For the first time since he had left Camelot, he fell into his dreams with the confidence that the next day would bring something better. The curve of wood around them felt like an impregnable shield, the space inside it welcoming and snug. Arthur had no more than laid his head down, with the cloak Merlin had brought spread over them both, when he felt himself sliding into a deep and healing sleep. He was not sure whether or not Merlin had needed to use magic to accomplish that.

**

The journey took longer than it needed to. Merlin, having consulted a scrying bowl to find that Camelot was in a calmer state than when he had left it, set a tarrying pace that that he would not normally have expected Arthur could keep to, especially in anticipation of the feasting and tears that were bound to greet his home-coming. He insisted on inspecting Arthur's wounds before they set out in the morning, in case they were worse than they had seemed and turning poisonous. They weren't. Arthur had a habit of brushing off life-threatening injuries like scratches, and it was nothing physical that slowed him down now.

It was beautiful weather to be out of doors, Merlin supposed, crisp and bright and all the more charming to a man who had come close to losing simple pleasures like these. After the barrenness of the island, even the first advances of spring must have seemed a bit miraculous. The rain came at night, when the roof of whatever barn or ruin they had found needed only a little magic to keep them dry, and left the days mild and light, the clouds like high, trailing curtains.

Mostly he tried not to intrude on Arthur's peace of mind. It could have been awkward without the daily business of the castle to provide topics for argument and opportunities for mockery. But the silence seemed to be good for Arthur, so he let it go on. The rhythm of Arthur's boots on the path ahead of him was its own welcome sort of conversation.

"You were bluffing, weren’t you? About drawing a line on a map. There's no way you could have done that."

He had resolved not to hold anything back from Arthur now, nothing at all, no matter what, unless there was a really good reason for it.

"Oh, probably," he shrugged. The thing with his magic was he had no idea what was possible until he'd already done it. "It didn't matter anyway. I knew I'd never have to prove I could do it."

"You were lucky." He gave Merlin a reproving sort of look over his shoulder. "I could have told you she wasn't stupid enough to fall for that, if you'd bothered to ask me first."

It was the first time he'd really fallen back into the smugness that was such a familiar part of him. Merlin wanted someone he could hug for gratitude.

"You could have told me, could you?" he replied, a grin creeping into his voice. "You'd been on that island two weeks and hadn't noticed a sorceress stealing your blood for a spell or a wizard enchanted into a pretty obviously man-shaped tree. I, on the other hand. I had been on the island less than a day, and I could see from one look at them that the thing that would scare them most was the thought of being separated."

He thought about how he'd known that, the bleak place where that intuitive insight had come from, the recent and still aching wounds that had taught him how much absence could hurt.

With great care, Arthur let a bent tree branch swing back into his face.

"You really are missing the stables and the chamber pot, aren't you Merlin?"

And that gave Merlin a swift and crippling wave of hope. It assumed that they were going back to Camelot, back to their old life, magic and all. Maybe telling his secret wasn't going to cost him everything he had. Arthur could spend as long as he wanted making Merlin work off his deception in the castle's filthiest chores, so long as he wasn't going to send him away.

They came to a stream in the late afternoon, the distant bark of a dog telling them there would be somewhere sheltered to sleep that night. With the footwork that underlay his accomplished swordsmanship, Arthur pretty much danced across the narrow log that bridged it. Out of habit, he reached back with his good arm to steady Merlin's clumsier efforts.

"Oh," he said suddenly, a moment after their hands had clasped. "You can stop yourself falling if you want to."

Merlin clenched his fingers to stop Arthur's hand pulling away. The effort unbalanced him so he had to use their grip for support, leaning on the strength of Arthur's good arm.

"It doesn't matter," he said, making the last uncertain steps onto solid ground. "You know I need all the help I can get."

He felt embarrassed under his smile. But Arthur looked pleased, and went loping along the riverbank with the contented pace of a man who had something to do and all the time in the world to do it.

Merlin couldn't stop himself noticing these things. For four days, he had lived in a world which Arthur was never coming back to. It had taught him what was important and what wasn't. In the evening he would watch Arthur's hands efficiently snapping twigs for a fire, or Arthur's mouth on the rim of a bowl of stew, and find himself wearing a stupid, fond grin to think how many moments like this still lay in front of them.

Arthur, when he noticed, would just give him a pitying look and invent a chore that needed doing.

**

On the way back, Arthur found all homes open to him and the owners full of welcome. Perhaps on the outward journey they had sensed something of the mistrust he had for himself. He was not an accomplished liar and might have shown his guilt on his face.

But he knew that was not what made the difference. People trusted Merlin instantly. The lady of the farm-house hushed her dogs, assessed him with a glance and counted him as a friend, even though the hand that accepted the mug she offered could have struck her down with one angry flourish. Arthur did not think for a moment that their affection was induced by any sort of spell. Few people disliked Merlin, and those who did were people like his father, who saw in Merlin's stubborn will the most fundamental threat to their authority. Those who meant Camelot harm took against Merlin before anyone else, and that had to mean something.

They had not discussed what might happen at the end of their journey. For all Merlin knew, Arthur was going to turn him over to the king for a sorcerer, and see how his magic fared against the full might of Camelot's army. Or, in mercy, Arthur could send him away into exile. Arthur was waiting for any sign that the choice he was making was the wrong one. The path he wanted to take was not the one he should. Merlin was dangerous enough already, and the direction he recognised they were taking would put him more firmly in Merlin's power than ever. But there was trust there. A king's greatest strength was knowing where to place his trust. His father's failures there had taught Arthur deep and bitter lessons. He had consulted his instincts at every step of their journey, and nothing had told him that Merlin meant him harm. Yet he could not quite conquer the feeling that he might be seeing what he wanted to see, imagining more than what was, in some sort of hang-over from the days on the island he had longed for comfort and thought astonishingly of Merlin before anyone else.

Merlin was searching out gaps in the roof of the loft as Arthur reached the top of the ladder and sat on the edge of the platform to get his boots off. It was warmer already than it should be, a sure sign of the magic that was always present now but rarely mentioned. Whether outdoors or indoors, their sleeping quarters were never too cold, but never quite heated properly either. In the middle of the night, it got chilly enough for them to draw together for the elusive heat radiating through each other's clothes. Arthur liked to wake like that, to the consciousness of Merlin's hair against his neck, Merlin's hand curled in between his arm and his ribs, Merlin's bony knees bumping him. It reminded him that Merlin was still Merlin, underneath his secret.

It took him back to that night in Merlin's mother's house, the two of them wedged into the tiny curtained-off room, murmuring insults at each other in the dark. It was the first night he remembered a sense of something lacking in his life. At the time, he'd wondered how he might have been different if he'd had a brother: someone he could share a bond with that set them apart from the rest of the world, loyal to each other before all others, even their father. That night had left a quiet touch of regret in him that he'd never quite erased. Now, what he wanted from Merlin was infinitely more complicated.

"There," Merlin declared, leaving off his repairs. "Fit for a prince."

He lay back on the old straw, hands behind his head, and grinned as if he'd just found Arthur an eiderdown mattress decked out in silk.

Merlin was taking particular care of him, Arthur noticed each and every new way in which he did it. But then Merlin took care of a lot of people, it was in his nature to be solicitous. It wasn't enough any longer. Arthur wanted something that was his alone, that didn't have to be shared.

He swiped a dirty strand of cobweb out of Merlin's hair and tossed it over the edge. Then he blew out the stump of candle sitting on a rafter and drew the cloak over them both.

"It will do for now."

**

In the mid afternoon, they passed a sprawling chestnut tree with a grove of what might have been apple around it. The young blossoms hung on the branches like pearl drops, a few of them feathery and starting to unfurl. They were descending a dry hillside with a view over the flat valley beneath, and on the far side was a fort that Merlin recognised as an outlying defence of Camelot. There couldn't be more a day or two left in their journey, and looking at the squat stone of the fortress, Merlin admitted to himself that he was not as eager to get home as he should have been.

Arthur had bent on one knee to examine some rock or beetle that was invisible to Merlin's eye. The grass where he had dumped his pack looked inviting. The haze on the other side of the valley signified fine rain. Arthur had not moved for some time.

"Shall we camp here, then?" Merlin asked eventually.

Arthur looked up as if he had just noticed their location for the first time, as if he'd forgotten how to tell the difference between evening and broad daylight.

"If you like," he said as he strode into the clearing in the middle of the grove, forgetting whatever had occupied his attention and tossing his pack against a tree trunk.

Sitting on the spread-out cloak, Merlin peeled the eggs from last night's farm house, but neither of them ate. The afternoon had a long way left to go. They could have covered a few miles more if they had not chosen to stop.

Arthur was doing the pointless, fidgety things that impatience always made him do, picking at the stitching on his boot in a way that was quickly going to make a genuine hole worthy of his attention. His fingers tapped emptily without the knife that he had recently lost the habit of playing with. He filled his cupped palm with water from the skein and washed his face and hands. All Merlin could see was the path the droplets made as they clung to his neck, turning the linen of his shift dark as they slid down. He scrubbed his hands dry, distracted, his attention flying in every direction except the one where Merlin sat on the cloak beside him.

Merlin's pulse had gone quick and jittery, as if his blood knew better than he did what was happening. It could be anything. It could be that Arthur was about to tell him he was not going to be allowed to come back to Camelot at all. Yes, it could be anything. He tried not to dwell on the fact that there were flowers all around them and Arthur was, above all else, a romantic. It was bad enough waking up every morning to more than he'd ever had before, and a tiny fraction of what he'd discovered he wanted.

Arthur reached over Merlin's shoulder to snap off the blossom-heavy end of a branch. He came close enough for his breath to fall warmly over Merlin's jaw. As if the twig required some precision to extract, he took his time, while Merlin looked down the strong line of his neck, to the sheltered skin behind his shirt, and told himself not to do anything stupid. Just as it occurred to him that this was exactly the time to do something stupid, if he was ever going to take the risk, Arthur leaned back.

He gave the blossoms a cursory sniff before turning his undirected energy on the twig instead, unplucking the furled buds. Merlin couldn't stop himself watching the idle task, the delicate flowers slowly peeling open under Arthur's broad fingers and work-blunted nails. When Arthur had bad news to give, he was always firmer than he needed to be, as if to take the responsibility wholly onto himself. If it was bad news, he would not be hesitating. This was Arthur as Merlin rarely saw him, out of his depth.

"What you did, coming after me," Arthur said, frowning at the twig. "That was a decent thing to do, Merlin. More than decent. You didn’t have to."

Arthur's expressions of gratitude were almost as clumsy as his apologies, and even rarer. Merlin usually tried to spare them both the discomfort by cutting him short, but this time he wanted too badly to know what Arthur was thinking.

"Believe it or not, I try not to be completely useless. And Camelot needs you."

"Yes," replied Arthur, sounding disappointed. "Camelot needs me. But you'd have done it for Gaius too. Wouldn't you? Or Gwen, or Gwaine, or some Druid boy you'd only met that morning. That's the trouble with you, Merlin. You'd do it for anyone."

There was no delicate way to say that Arthur wasn't just anyone to him. As Arthur's absence had shown him, truth by little truth, what had lain in his heart all too long, Merlin had accepted it as a fact far too certain to be challenged. Arthur had changed him, as irreversibly as rust on an axle, and it was pointless to wish himself free again.

He couldn't say that, for the first time, he distrusted his magic because he found himself wanting to use it purely to make Arthur happy, even though he'd learned the hard way that it should never be wielded idly. He couldn’t say that he no longer knew the limits of what he would do for Arthur.

So Merlin said, to the general vicinity of the ground, "I wouldn't, you know. Have done it for just anyone."

"I suppose you should have some kind of reward for all of this."

Since Merlin already had everything he'd set out for, sitting whole and living beside him, he could only ask, "What sort of reward?"

The twig was stripped bare now, showing the pale fibres under the bark. Arthur closed his hand over it decisively and looked up.

"Me," he said. "You could have me."

He blinked as if he'd heard what he'd just said and regretted it, gaze slipping down uncertainly to Merlin's shoulder. "If that was something you wanted."

The day's warmth was only just beginning to chill. With no breeze to move them, the misty clouds over the fortress were not heading in their direction. Arthur was close enough to reach out for. Through a stunned sort of grin, Merlin said, "Good. My shoes are going to need a lot of mending by the time we get back."

"No," Arthur replied evenly. "If you take that attitude, I’ll insert them in a place where they'll need a lot more than mending."

Merlin hesitated, in case what was about to happen changed things between them in a way that could not be put back together again afterwards. Then he reached out to take hold of Arthur's wrist, left his fingers wrapped around the girth of it, let the gesture speak for itself.

"What would you know about cobbling anyway?" he said. "I'd have to label the front and back so you could tell which end was which."

With the sort of ease that made Merlin the slightest bit breathless, Arthur leaned back, tugging on Merlin's arm to pull him down on top of him. He came to rest front-first, slumped over Arthur's side, one hand steadying himself on the grass by Arthur's cheek. Clearly where Arthur had meant him to land, as if he had already known how the joints and balances of Merlin’s body would work in motion, with the same instinct that knew the momentum of a knife as it flew end over end from his grasp to the target.

Fingers spread out over the base of Merlin’s spine, where they drew exploratory lines through his shirt, Arthur kept him pinned in place while he looked at Arthur’s mouth and tried to work out what to do about it.

“Front and back, you were saying?” Arthur prompted. “You were about to give me a lesson in telling them apart.”

Once embarked upon a course of action, Arthur always saw it through, never indecisive, never diverting except in the face of certain disaster. That thought, and the first presumptuous brush of Arthur’s fingertips finding their way to bare skin on his back, made Merlin greedy for more. He shifted his weight, bracing his outside knee against the ground. With the slightest sidewards roll, he dropped his thigh down between Arthur’s, pressed their bodies tight, replaced the smug look on Arthur’s face with something unfocussed and vulnerable.

From an idle thing Leon had said once, in a reckless moment riding back from a confrontation with a basilisk that none of them had been sure they would live through, he guessed that up until Arthur had assumed command of his father’s knights at sixteen, he had indulged in the habit of dallying with those of them who were young and willing. It seemed, from the way Arthur moved against his thigh, that since that day, virtue had been harder to endure than he had ever let on.

Merlin shifted again, crushing the swelling heat between them, and turned his face into Arthur’s neck where the skin was already growing damp. He had not meant to go from one thing to the other so swiftly. But this was Arthur, warm like he carried a furnace within him, and Merlin’s fingertips remembered how he had felt on the island, cold as iron as if the very essence of him had been bled out. It was true, Merlin could no more imagine the sky with the sun torn out of it than picture his life without Arthur. And here Arthur was, chest rising and falling underneath him, his cheeks a little hollower than they should be but his eyes as alive as Merlin had ever seen them.

Arthur’s fingers strained to force their way under the tied waist of Merlin’s breeches, moulding themselves over the curve of flesh beneath, pulling him down. They moved clumsily against each other, greedy and raw so that Merlin felt pain entwined with the pleasure, but he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, could only lever his legs to push himself closer and closer as Arthur shuddered under him and went still.

Later, with his head tucked under Arthur’s chin and Arthur not minding that Merlin couldn’t stop touching him – the delicate skin over the ready muscle around his ribs; the fine curve inside his hip; the hair that gently tickled Merlin’s palm as he stroked it – the urgency of it seemed a bit unnecessary. Arthur didn’t have a fickle bone in his body and it was still a good while before dusk.

The second time, Merlin used his hand on Arthur, as slow as he could make himself go, curious to find out how he liked it best. He kept the sound of Arthur’s heartbeat under his ear, listening to how it sped up, then evened out to the same comfortable rhythm as the fingers stroking Merlin’s back. A fine mist of rain began to waft under the trees afterwards, catching in Arthur’s hair as he leant down to press his mouth under Merlin’s jaw, before Merlin banished it away with a majestic flourish.

In the last of the light, Merlin fetched the eggs and returned to Arthur's arms to share them out, kissing his mouth clean afterwards, still a little bit amazed to think he had the right to do it. The kissing led to Arthur rolling him into the slippery grass and reminding him of the easy strength he had hidden under the restraint of his courtly training.

“Do something about the cold,” Arthur said with a lazy slur as he kissed his way down the line between Merlin’s ribs. He said it exactly as he might have requested a clean shirt or a top-up of ale.

It took Merlin half a dozen attempts to make a spell stick. Arthur was doing that beautifully possessive thing with his hands again, and Merlin was learning that the sort of entitlement that, from other men, had brought out the fight in him, from Arthur just made him sigh and arch his body whichever way Arthur seemed to want him to go.

The spell was embarrassingly weak. Arthur’s spiky jaw was grazing just under his navel, one hand easing his thighs further apart. Later, once he’d proved that Arthur could be reduced to the same sort of ravenous trembling that beset Merlin just now, he was going to build a solid fire. He was going to do it without magic, and embarrass Arthur into helping him. Because after it all, whatever they did in a sheltered grove in the netherworld of a journey’s end, whatever undignified uses Arthur might be prepared to put his mouth to here and now, it did not make a scrap of difference to the bitter reality that awaited them at Camelot.

**

Merlin's steps had grown slower. On the hill that gave them their first distant glimpse of Camelot's walls, he stopped altogether.

"I hope you're not expecting a carriage to take you the rest of the way." Though dimly aware of what lay ahead, Arthur still could not make himself take it seriously. He felt like a man risen from a plague bed, miraculously living. "Knowing what I'm in for once my father finds out I'm not dead, I'd like to stay on the road as long as I can."

The thin jerk in Merlin's mouth was nothing like a smile. "What?"

"Listen, Arthur. When we get back. About the-" His voice dropped low in his throat. "About the magic. Are you going to tell anyone? I'd rather be prepared for it if you are."

He was asking. After turning Arthur's whole life upside-down in the space of a fortnight, endangering the security of the entire realm, even after what they had done, he was asking whether he could expect absolution. Maybe he thought they'd spent the whole of yesterday afternoon and the best part of the night saying some twisted and cruel kind of farewell before Arthur sent him to the stake.

"I've got a dilemma here, haven't I Merlin? On the one hand, there's the safety of Camelot, the respect of my father, and my solemn duty to uphold the law. On the other hand, my manservant is asking me to cover up the kingdom's most abominated crime."

Merlin couldn't get any paler than he was. He just looked ill behind his smile, like a young recruit in the instant of taking an arrow. It was unsettling how badly Arthur wanted him not to look that way. His general protective impulse towards Merlin had got intensely focused and very particular. It wrenched in his chest like he was the one with the arrow wound.

"You blundering, straw-brained idiot." He turned away down the path, exasperated with both of them, unbalanced by the way the fractional changes of the last day seemed to have shifted his whole perspective on everything, much more than he'd expected. In any case, the answer to his question had been obvious to him long before then. "When have I _ever_ chosen Camelot?"

It had gone very quiet behind him. He had known about Merlin's magic for all of six days. Now that it was no longer a secret, Merlin could use his powers in petty ways, to make himself the master of everything they did, to gain revenge for all the little insults Arthur threw out as barbs designed to catch and keep his attention. Right now, a spell could strike between his shoulders.

Arthur had no rational basis for the fond and unshakeable certainty that it wouldn't ever happen like that.

Merlin just threw a soft clod of earth at him in the good old mortal way.

"Thank you, Merlin," he said, calling on all his reserves of hauteur.

"You too," replied Merlin softly, in a way that made warmth and affection and anticipation climb up the back of his neck.

The journey could take them one more night, if they kept it slow.

**

The end


	5. Epilogue - In a Different Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who commented on this fic or left kudos, and especially all the generous comments here and on my journal. It makes such a difference to me, knowing people are reading and liking it enough to let me know. This epilogue would never have been written without the impetus of comments here and on Must be Drunk. I can't thank you enough, so I wrote this instead.
> 
> To recap (because it's been a while) this is the story where a series of inexplicable miracles convinced Arthur that he was magic, and he faked his own death and went off on a noble but foolish quest to cure himself. Misty island, witch, blood draining, wizard enchanted into tree ... basically, Merlin saved him. And they learned a few truths about their feelings for each other. Then, of course, they had to go home.
> 
> Fair warning: this is kissing fic. There is an awful lot of kissing. What can I say, they do it so beautifully!

**In a different light**

Merlin was wiping down Gaius's work bench, meticulously. The act of running the damp rag over each familiar whorl and chip of it allowed him to string out the odd, pleasant sense of connection it gave him. Connection to the table, to Gauis's work, to Camelot, to his whole life here and now.

It was quiet all around, apart from where Gaius was sifting some chopped burdock root out of a solution by pressing it through a fine cloth. Everyone was in the hall, at yet another supper that had turned into a protracted feast because Arthur was at it. Arthur, whose empty seat they had very nearly grown used to seeing.

Merlin had slipped away once the bowls had given way to tankards and talk. It would be idle talk, talk for the sake of it, for the sake of sharing company, full of comfortable pauses and sudden rallies when someone feared the silence was turning into an ending. They would keep Arthur with them as long as they could, and he would give them what he felt he owed them, every last moment, to make up for the great lie he had made them believe, and the other lie which he would have to keep on telling now, for Merlin's sake.

Merlin had slipped away because eventually they would press Arthur to re-tell the story of how the winged beast with lion claws had plucked him from the saddle, dripping blood from its past prey as it went, and carried him into the mountains; how it had taken him days to climb down from its lair and find his way towards home; how Merlin had caught a glimpse of the beast circling to recapture him as he fled and gone out to bring him back. Every lie took its toll on Arthur, in the shame that Merlin could see at work on him, in the fractional corruption of his integrity. It was easier for him when Merlin, who knew the truth, was not there to watch him do it.

As he rinsed the rag in the bucket and dripped water onto a stubborn drop of sap, there were footsteps at the door, and he was already giving way to a smile when he glanced up to see Arthur, looking familiar but not quite the same. He wore the black doublet trimmed in fur and small pearls that his father had ordered to be made on his second day back. The dark colour and opulent texture gave him a graver aspect, older, more thoughtful than he had been before, as if its sobriety countered his irrepressible urge to action. But the change was more than the effect of his new clothes. Arthur had grown stiller all around. On the training field with his knights, his voice carried, as commanding as ever, and when they drank together afterwards he could turn on an easy grin that reassured his men that nothing had changed. But Merlin observed the shadow on him from his exile. Observed it, and felt it in his own mind, too. They had both made choices that could not be undone now.

"Gaius," Arthur said. "The king seemed a little off colour after his meal. You must take him his tonic straight away."

Gaius continued coaxing the liquid through his sieve with the back of a wooden spoon. "Yes, certainly. Merlin, if you don't mind, you'll find it-"

"I'd like you to see him yourself. Considering the – history, it could be more than what it seems."

"You're quite right, I suppose," Gaius replied with a sigh as he gathered the edges of the cloth together and laid it and the remainder of its contents in an empty bowl. "These last weeks have been hard on him."

Arthur made no reply to that as Gaius took down a vial and peered at it critically, fished out a clean cloth from beneath the workbench and wrapped it and then, as an afterthought, uncorked the vial to add another pinch of powder from one of his multitude of jars.

When he had gone, Arthur closed the door behind him and leaned on the wall beside it, making no interruption as Merlin swapped his rag for a broom and started to sweep under the table.

"What's wrong with your father?" Merlin asked as he worked, thinking that it could be a great many things.

As far as he could gather, Gaius and Leon between them had done a fine job of containing the first violent rage of Uther's reaction to his son's apparent death. They had kept the shocked and unsleeping king pacing in the safety of his rooms, too distracted to notice how, for all the tremendous noise and terror of their arrests, few prisoners had suffered any serious harm. Then, on the evening after Merlin's departure, Uther's manservant had found the king on the floor by his bed, befuddled and too weak even to call for the execution of the sorcerer he no doubt would have blamed for the injury inflicted on him.

Whatever the source of his weakness, the long days it took to pass leeched the anger out of him, replacing it with the visible weight of grief, so that the man who greeted his unexpected son with his knuckles clenched white on the arm of his chair had been a shadow of his former self, his cheek and shoulder still drooping slightly on the left hand side.

"He's been looking better every day since he got you back," Merlin said, which was no more than the truth.

He leaned down to sweep up some dead leaves deep under the table, a bit more purposeful now that Arthur was here to see him work.

"Merlin."

He'd made another two lunges at the leaves before the meaning of that tone registered properly. It was only when he turned that he noted the particular way that Arthur was leaning against the wall: making it a temporary gesture, impatient, expectant. Merlin quickly put down the broom. Arthur didn't run idle errands in the middle of meals. He didn't slouch against walls just to observe the castle staff going about their daily chores.

Any doubt was banished by the way Arthur's attention clung to him as he approached, no attempt to feign interest in anything else. And then there was the way his arms unfolded from his chest when Merlin drew near, making a space for Merlin to slide into as he moved in, settling his hands on Arthur's shoulders.

He gave a lovely little hitch of breath when Merlin kissed him, released as a long, melting exhalation through his nose as their mouths adjusted into each other. Under his hands, Arthur's shoulders lost their tension - Merlin thought distantly, if only he'd know that the worst of the stress Arthur subjected himself to could be kissed away so easily.

Arthur had been a bit strident about kissing, the first time they'd done it on its own, in the damp grass under the chestnut tree with the afternoon pretty much used up in pleasure already. For Arthur, it was yet another skill that, once learned, should be demonstrated to the best of his ability each time, with utmost determination. Merlin had worked hard on coaxing him into a slower speed, trying to show him how it was a favour to be accepted as well as bestowed, how every kiss they shared could be different from the others.

Tonight, Arthur tasted of an evening of ale, bitter residue behind the comforting yeast, the taste of shared company and easy talk. His jaw was abrasive as Merlin bit his way gently over it, sucking damp, indulgent kisses above the bone until he reached the first smooth skin beneath his ear and came to rest just there, with his face turned into the side of Arthur's neck and the castle falling into a quiet moment around them.

Arthur didn't seek this out very often. But then, he hardly needed to – it had been a miraculous surprise to them both to find how little either of them had to. Their daily routine was full of ordinary private moments which, with the right glance or touch of an enquiring hand, could turn swiftly into an embrace, or something more. It turned out that Arthur already spent a great part of his day in Merlin's company with no-one around to see what they did. The challenge had been in disciplining themselves to keep from starting anything more ambitious than they had time to finish. And that proved more difficult than it should have been because Arthur, who was crown prince first and foremost, from the moment he woke until the moment his head hit the pillow, seemed to need the distraction of it more than Merlin did, and was almost never the one to call a sensible halt.

Even now, when Merlin was thinking of going back to the last of his chores, warmed by the thought of Arthur waiting for him upstairs, holding onto the desire they'd worked up as a lovely reward to be kept for later, the grip of Arthur's hands behind the small of his back told him he wasn't going to walk away without resistance.

"Go on," he tried, lips moving right over Arthur's steady pulse. "I won't be long."

But Arthur's hands had grown restless on his back, palms exploring the contours of his body beneath his clothes, as if he might find them different from any other day.

"I'm not going anywhere." As he said it, in a growl that vibrated in Merlin's mouth, he slid both hands down over Merlin's buttocks and pulled him roughly against him. And there it was, that perceptible moment when their kiss turned urgent, when Merlin lost his grip on prudence and got swept up in the tide of Arthur's desire. "And neither are you." None of his good intentions could ever withstand Arthur like this, when he held Merlin possessively against him and kissed him like it was never going to be enough. For Merlin, as long as he retained the vivid memory of the three guards returning with Arthur's horse – of their blank faces, of the blood-stained saddle that would be empty forever, of the feeling of his heart going cold and heavy in his chest – it never would be.

"You want to get caught, do you?" he finally managed to say against the wet corner of Arthur's mouth, smiling. "He'll be back any moment."

"Don't tell me you're eager to get back to your cleaning," Arthur frowned. "Or was there something else you were up to?"

They didn't talk about magic much, because the law was still the law and agitating for change now, while Uther was still not quite himself, would look far too much like treason. It remained a mystery which Arthur had not sought to unravel; something about Merlin he appeared to accept as an unavoidable part of him, like his obstinate lack of ceremony in serving Arthur's breakfast or handing him his sword. From time to time he asked tactical questions, out of the blue, like could Merlin make a horse throw its rider, and if so at what distance and how many riders at a time, and how grievous would a battle wound have to be before it was beyond the cure of magic. Merlin answered his questions plainly and kept his own talk to everyday subjects which they shared, and mostly things went along as they had before.

Except for this. Leaning back, Merlin ran his finger from Arthur's chin, down the line of this throat until it caught in the neck of his shirt.

"One day, Arthur. One day I'll put a broom in your hand and teach you all about the ancient mystery of _sweeping._ No time like the-"

Arthur's mouth cut him off, slow but insistent, as his hand slid under Merlin's shirt to tease his bare skin, following the indentation of his lower spine, up and down. The familiar gesture brought the lower half of Merlin's body alive with expectation, stoked up his desire to a level that was not going to wane again without being taken care of.

Merlin had to put his hand over Arthur's mouth to break up the kiss that Arthur was hanging onto with all his formidable determination. "All right." His voice never sounded like his own when Arthur did this to him, all solemn and hoarse and thrown. "Go upstairs. I'll follow you."

Arthur glanced pointedly at the closed door of Merlin's little chamber.

Just as Merlin was drawing breath to scoff at the possibility that Arthur, who set such store in surrounding himself with the correct quality of every last thing (neither too coarse nor too fine), might make do with the musty, meagre old wool of what passed for Merlin's bed, he remembered that Arthur did not make self-sacrificing concessions for the sake of courtesy, and most times was oblivious to the entire possibility of such a gesture. If he could keep his wits about him with an eighty-foot dragon bearing down on him, he was not about to accidentally compromise his standards just because they'd worked each other up against a convenient bit of wall. Not unless he was changing the rules of what they did. Letting another door open.

He shifted his hand to trace the heated swell of Arthur's lips with his fingertip, and waited for the surge of tenderness to pass. Sometimes it was the most unexpected little things that made his throat feel too small for his voice. When they had met, Arthur had been full of arrogant certainty, as set against change as the thickest of the castle's walls. Now he had let Merlin open him up – only a little, almost imperceptibly, because a king could not be seen to be too easily influenced – and nudge him out of his old routines. In these reckless little departures, Merlin saw his own influence, and Arthur's consent to be influenced, and it humbled him.

"Right," Merlin said, backing away towards his chamber, breaking Arthur's grasp. "In that case you need to finish what you started."

"I started?" Arthur objected, even as he pulled Merlin into the dark room without waiting for him to fetch a candle. "I came here to see Gaius, but it seems I can't even do that without getting waylaid by insatiable manservants. One minute I was having a civilised conversation about my father's health, the next thing I knew I had an armful of-"

As he turned from kicking the door closed, Merlin backed him up against it, resuming their earlier position.

"-of you."

The dark was good. The dark made them both a bit urgent, as if they could make up with touch what they were missing in vision. The way Arthur's hands worked roughly at his belt meant it was going to be one of those times they got properly undressed, every stitch of clothing thrown off, all their skin laid bare for hands and mouths to fasten onto.

He let Arthur undress him, pressing against his knuckles at each brush of skin-on-skin contact. That got him more breathless than anything, the touch of Arthur's hands on him, the broad span of fingers he spent all day trying not to watch in their distractingly competent grip on a sword or a set of reins.

"What, are you sewn into this?" Arthur protested, trying to force Merlin's shirt and undershirt together over the sharp angle of his elbows.

The cold prickled along the newly bare skin of Merlin's back. He wriggled free and let Arthur drop the discarded clothes on the ground. "A one-armed troll could have done a better job of that," he grinned, leaning in to nip at Arthur's jaw. "I'd almost think you weren't interested."

And that, finally, got him the undivided attention of Arthur's beautiful hands, restless and strong as they flexed over his shoulder blades, splayed over the small of his back to pull their hips together hard. Once he'd renewed his previous assault on Merlin's mouth, he pushed him back just far enough to snap the tie of his breeches and shove them down.

"More to your liking, Merlin?" he asked, already reaching down to take him in hand.

More and more of what Arthur did was to Merlin's liking these days. That hadn't been a quick transformation, because there was so much that Merlin had to teach him by demonstration instead of by telling him outright in a way that would only provoke his pride and turn him scoffing and defensive. No, it had been a long and patient process to communicate to Arthur that the habits he'd developed in his adolescence, when impatience had been everything, impatience and the assertion of his masculinity, were only the shallow beginnings of what they could do together.

He breathed out Arthur's name, because although Arthur was learning to listen for his reactions and home in on what drove him craziest, blunt encouragement never hurt.

"You," Arthur murmured, smug and pleased, biting under Merlin's jaw in time with his strokes, "are too easy."

He was helpless for Arthur's hands on him, simple as that.

He let Arthur have the victory of stealing his words not once but twice with the pressure of his mouth before he managed to reply in a breathless rush- "You're the only one who thinks so."

And then Arthur kissed him and went down on his knees, and Merlin's mind was wiped blank. That was the thing that he had learned from Arthur in all of this. Sometimes it was simple. Sometimes the whole world was as simple as Arthur's mouth on him, the hot need of it and the pleasure he wanted to hold onto forever. Sometimes nothing mattered except Arthur's hair growing damp between his fingers; the skin of his his lower back all slippery under Arthur's palm; both of them stripped down to the skin and moving together. Sometimes it was about wanting each other too badly to let subtlety delay their satisfaction by a moment.

He surrendered to it, let pure sensation overcome him, and Arthur caught him easily, laughing, as his legs gave out.

Much later in the night, they used their hands on each other, awkward and wonderful as they took it slowly, Merlin's way, punctuated by breathy, careful kisses, teasing each other and stringing out their mutual pleasure as long as they could.

Later still, Arthur must have searched out his clothes by touch and returned to his own room. When Merlin woke up, it was to his own strewn clothes and a bed that felt changed. To look at, it was only slightly more rumpled than usual, and not especially soiled. The difference was invisible, a matter of history, as if the covers remembered the shape of Arthur's legs and chest beneath them; as if the grain of the fabric had absorbed the shadow of him and kept it.

The morning was quite late already, bright light coming under his door. In it, among the grit on the floor, sat a tiny sphere too perfect to be a pebble. Crawling over to it, he took it between his thumb and finger. One of the small pearls from Arthur's new doublet.

Jewels were inconsequential to Arthur – if anything, an annoyance that made the business of donning armour just a fraction more difficult. He wore them with no more pleasure than the plainest garment in his wardrobe, and took them out only because it pleased his father to see them on him. But the pearl doublet was special to Merlin. It belonged to the Arthur who'd come back from the brink of death, who had a claim on him that was more than friendship and a lot more than destiny.

He put the pearl under his pillow and pulled up the covers, and then he finished last night's chores.

**

Arthur woke up thinking about the well by the north wall that no-one could use because some cat or squirrel had fallen into it and died, leaving an awful smell. It would take his men the most part of a day to drain it, bucket by bucket, and it was a long walk to get water from the square until it filled up again. He wondered whether Merlin would be able to fix it faster, and whether he'd offer to do it or wait for Arthur to ask, or just sneak out and take care of it one night so that Arthur had to wait for the rumour mill to bring the news to him.

If the stakes moved to bigger things than local wells, he was going to have to make sure that Merlin didn't go behind his back, especially with magic. But, in defiance of everything he'd been schooled to expect, Merlin's magic gave him the least anxiety of all the potential catastrophes under this care.

It was Arthur's job to size up the loyalty of each subject in his realm: to understand how it was secured, how far it could be stretched, and what extremes of hardship or temptation might turn an ally into a traitor. Merlin, he knew, had a villager's sense of hierarchy – which was to say, none at all. Lacking the military man's habit of defining himself by where he stood in the chain of command, Merlin had never been taught to bestow his respect anywhere except where he judged it earned.

His respect had been hard-won, but Arthur had won it – in all honesty, he had suspected that for some time. What he hadn't been sure of was whether he had won it as a man or as a prince. Then Merlin, searching him out on that island, fighting for him when he had lain stripped of all the hallmarks of his office, had given him his answer.

He counted Merlin among the very rare things that belonged to him in his own right, and not to the kingdom. More than that, though, he thought as he rolled onto his side to get a glimpse out of the window and discover whether they'd be training in the wet or the dry. It took him a while to put his finger on it, as he watched the grey streaks shifting among the high white clouds. Merlin was Arthur's, but not Arthur's responsibility. Because Merlin, it still tweaked his pulse to remember, could look after himself. Merlin could look after a lot more than himself.

He could not, however, master basic courtesies like punctuality. Arthur had turned his mind to half collapsed arch under the east turret when Merlin finally arrived, later than he should have, without apology, and dropped a breakfast plate on the table.

"At your leisure, Merlin. Don't get up early on my account."

Merlin's expression said that since he'd stayed up late on Arthur's account, he felt well entitled to a sleep-in. He sat on the end of the bed, leaning back against the post with his legs stretched out. It was hard to believe, sometimes, that Arthur had slept all his adult life in this bed with no-one to take the unthinkable liberty of approaching it. Merlin's very presence here was intimate.

Arthur drew up his knees, because it was unseemly how quickly his thoughts about Merlin could turn carnal. He had to sort out the well, a dispute about a stonemason's account, and a handful of other little disasters before he met his knights on the training ground. They didn't have time for what his body kept assuming was imminent every time Merlin came into his room. Even if he hadn't had his fill last night, they didn't have time to start it all over again.

"What do you want?" he said, grumpy, because they never had as much time as he wanted and he couldn't even look at Merlin this morning without thinking about the pleasure of those clever fingers digging into the cramped muscles just over his shoulder-blades; how disarmingly right it felt when he was lodged in the angle of Merlin's thighs, wiry legs wrapped tight around him.

Merlin said, "Gaius needs my help with his inventory all day. And tomorrow too." On top of everything, he was taking far too long fulfilling Arthur's instruction that he find some promising youngster to take over his duties with Gaius, so he could stop dividing his time. "After that he's going out of town for supplies."

Something about his tone encouraged Arthur to reach out and take hold of Merlin's ankle, the bone of it fitting loosely in his grasp.

"Yes?"

"I'll stay here while he's away," Merlin told him, eyes positively glimmering. "In case anyone needs me."

Then he slid away and brought Arthur his breakfast to eat in bed.

That would be two nights' privacy, and the best part of three days. Two nights where he could see himself developing a vaguely life-threatening ailment that would require him to have someone by his side while he slept. Trying not to think about all the things they would finally have time for, of the prospect of having Merlin within arm's reach whenever his thoughts turned to him, he made short work of his bread and cheese.

"Anything else you need?" Merlin leant on the bed, close in.

He ran his thumb over Merlin's bottom lip, because Merlin liked idle touches like that, even when they weren't about to turn into anything more. Merlin gave a little sigh as if he didn't know how he was going to make it through to tomorrow evening either.

"Nothing that can't wait."

"Good choice," Merlin said, moving back out of reach. He drew out the day's clothes quickly from the cupboard and shook them out. Arthur kept his attention on the closed door as Merlin settled his belt and fastened it, but his grasp lingered, hooked inside the leather, when he was done.

"Go on then. What is it?"

The smile Merlin flashed him was the too-bright one he used when he expected to meet with scorn, or anger.

"It's nothing really. Only, I've got an idea about the well."

Some days, not kissing Merlin was harder than others. Arthur turned around to pick up his jacket that was folded over the stool and took his time putting it on.

"Arthur? Just give me a-"

"Do whatever you need to," Arthur told him before he could think twice about it. "Do it quietly. And come and see me if you need any help."

There was a conspicuously long silence. Then Merlin replied quietly, "I'll do that."

That made two things he didn't have to worry about. The first drops of rain were drumming against the window pane, but Arthur found himself smiling as he opened his door.

"And do it soon," he added over his shoulder. "Because I guarantee you won't have any free time while Gaius is away."

It was a curious feeling to part from Merlin now. That much had changed. Arthur was already anticipating the pleasure of letting his thoughts drift back to last night as he sat through whatever petitions and debates awaited him. The knowledge that, on the floor above, Merlin was straightening his pillows and trickling a jug of clean water into his wash basin would make him secretly, ridiculously, warm as he stood beside the throne.

Later, there was bound to be a magic plague or rampaging beast or treasonous plot to screw it all up. Well, Arthur was ready for it, whatever it was. He strode down the corridor into the waiting day.

**

**Author's Note:**

> Generously beta'd by absynthedrinker and snottygrrl and pingrid who each made this story better.


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